Precision Driven Health Finalist in NZ Innovation Awards

Precision Driven Health named as a finalist in the NZ Innovation Awards 2017

12 September, Auckland, New Zealand – Precision Driven Health has been named as a finalist in the Innovation in Health & Science category of the NZ Innovation Awards 2017.

Precision Driven Health (PDH) is a seven-year NZ$38m research partnership aimed at improving health outcomes through data science. The partnership centres around the international movement towards precision medicine, the growing body of international research that is identifying and enabling the capture and analysis of the big data that will facilitate healthcare to be tailored to the individual.

The NZ Innovation Awards are intended to give “smart, innovative NZ individuals and businesses a platform to be recognised and celebrated”. PDH has been named as a finalist in the Health & Science category - where innovators whose products, services or research are focused on developing innovation to solve problems or make improvements in human health, animal health, bioscience, medical research, general science, and molecular research. Evaluators are looking for innovations that are based on new technology or new ways of applying technology, science development or commercialisation of products or services.

PDH General Manager Dr Kevin Ross says, “Healthcare as we know it is tremendously wasteful. For example, of the $2.2 trillion annual healthcare spend in the United States, up to $1.2 trillion is wastage. This is largely because healthcare professionals don’t have access to, or a way to digest, comprehensive patient records that contain genetic, environmental and social information.”

Dr Ross continues, “PDH’s research programme harnesses New Zealand’s unique combination of existing electronic healthcare data and world-class research capability to enable the development of data-driven healthcare solutions that are applied globally.”’

To date, PDH has supported at least 13 academics, ten industry researchers and eleven students across over twenty projects. The project is already producing peer-reviewed, commercially-viable research, including two research articles and a keynote conference presentation. Commercial use of the initiatives research is already underway, with results from a project now influencing care at Waitemata District Health Board.

The other finalists in the Innovation in Health & Science category are Avalia Immunotherapies, BFW Innovations, CoLiberate, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, FlexiMap, MARS Bioimaging and Myovolt. Winners will be announced at the awards event on the 19th of October at the ANZ Viaduct Events Centre in Auckland.

ENDS

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