In February, UCI launched the Institute for Precision Health, a campus-wide, interdisciplinary endeavor that merges UCI’s powerhouse health sciences, engineering, machine learning, artificial intelligence, clinical genomics and data science capabilities. The objective is to identify, create and deliver the most effective health and wellness strategy for each individual person and, in doing so, confront the linked challenges of health equity and the high cost of care.
IPH will bring a multifaceted, integrated approach to what many call the next great advancement in healthcare. The institute is an ecosystem for collaboration across disciplines.
In addition to being the co-director & medical director of the Institute for Precision Health, Dr. Alpesh N. Amin, professor and chair of medicine, founded and developed UCI Health’s innovative hospitalist program. Hospitalists are doctors who primarily focus on taking care of hospitalized patients and running high quality, efficient hospitals.
Amin says he relishes all opportunities to use his combined M.D. and M.B.A. background, and his role in the Institute for Precision Health is the true dream come to life. “I’ve had many chances to help improve the quality and the safety of patient care at UCI, but IPH is truly the next level. It will allow us the opportunity to use health data how I always envisioned it should be used: to deliver the very best care and the very best chance at good health,” he says.
Amin has been recognized as one of “America’s Top Physicians” by Consumers’ Research Council of America, and he’s published hundreds of articles in academic publications. Here, he shares why he’s passionate about being on the ground floor of IPH.
You’ve had a long career as a physician, a hospitalist, a researcher and a professor. What intrigues you about IPH?
I’m most interested in this opportunity to use data to create value. I would love to see us be able to develop healthcare technology like the automobile industry has. If I’m sitting in an advanced car like a Tesla, and I want to go from point A to point B, it gives me the route. If something distracts me while I’m driving, I hear an alarm to get my attention and prevent an accident. And if I’m enroute and 15 miles ahead an accident occurs, it redirects me. So basically, it guides my journey. Precision health offers the potential also do that sort of guiding to patients on their health journeys. And this potential very much interests me.
I know that data will impact patient care and healthcare delivery, it will impact outcomes, and it will impact population health and individual health in a meaningful way. That’s what I want.
Do these changes feel imminent?
Sticking with the transportation metaphor, I’d say we’re still building the airplane. When my mom was a small kid mainly growing up in India, she and her parents relocated to Africa for a bit. The only way they could get to Africa was by a boat, and that took weeks. Of course, today you can fly from India to Africa in a few hours.
For precision health purposes, we’ve got the data and we know where our Africa is – that is, where we want to go. And we know we can fly over there, that it’s possible. But we still need to build the right plane. And then we must keep refining the plane to make the experience and results better and better.
My dad is a structural engineer. He designs skyscrapers. Sixty- or 70-plus years ago there was only a hope that you could build a skyscraper 100-plus stories tall. There was certainly the interest because land was getting more and more expensive, and there wasn’t as much of it. So, people knew that they needed to go up, but it hadn’t been done. Now we have many 100-plus story skyscrapers. I suppose my point is that we tend to innovate when we need to, when the will is there. I think the question is: Are we motivated to create a world where health data is used the way it should be used – to the benefit of each person and community?
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