AI-based smart hospitals: developing, deploying and evaluating tools to help hospitals manage demand

external supervisor

Professor Sarah Walker, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford

Background

Hospitals face unprecedented demands arising from changing population demographics, new models of service delivery, and the impact of COVID-19. Huge amounts of data are collected every day but only a very small amount is used to optimise how the hospital is run.

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE, RESEARCH METHODS AND TRAINING

The project will focus on developing and evaluating new tools for predicting the number of patients admitted and discharged from hospital each day, to help better run hospitals, accounting for seasonal infections and other pressures. Potential extensions include developing other AI-based tools to optimise the care of individual patients and automating detection of infection outbreaks.

Large-scale comprehensive healthcare data spanning over 5 years in Oxfordshire are available.

The candidate will learn a wide range of statistical and machine learning approaches, based in the Big Data Institute within a broad infection research consortium.

FIELD WORK, SECONDMENTS, INDUSTRY PLACEMENTS AND TRAINING

The DPhil will involve working closely with NHS hospitals and healthcare providers and possible contact with industry partners.

PROSPECTIVE STUDENT

The ideal candidate would like solving real-world applied problems that are also technically exciting and challenging, with excellent computational and numerical skills (although competence in specific techniques is not a pre-requisite).