Dean's message
Creating Opportunities
November 2024
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Our most recent Dean’s Council of Advisors meeting energized me greatly. Why? Because I could feel new opportunities being created at the intersection of engineering and the actual practice of healthcare.
My excitement stems from moments of direct dialogue between our Jacobs School of Engineering faculty and physicians from the (JCHI) at Â鶹´«Ã½ Health. One of this Center’s early successes is the roll out of an artificial intelligence (AI) model in the emergency departments at Â鶹´«Ã½ Health in order to quickly . The system provides physicians with actionable information ahead of obvious clinical manifestations.
This term actionable information returned again and again throughout the Dean’s Council meeting. We identified many opportunities to collaborate in order to arrive at actionable information that could be leveraged to save lives, while also improving the practice of healthcare.
Identifying actionable information and then integrating it into electronic health records is the important work of physicians in centers like JCHI. And to get to this actionable information, the most forward-looking doctors and centers must partner with engineers and computer scientists.
World-class engineering and computer science faculty are essential for creating the private and secure hardware, software, communication and sensor systems – and the requisite AI/ML, data and compute innovations – that are needed to generate streams of raw data and then turn them into actionable information.
already in these areas. A bed sensor project incorporating AI for chronic disease monitoring is one example. A hypertension and diabetes monitoring project with continuous glucose sensing and AI applications is another. But we can create so many more opportunities.
At one point during the Dean’s Council meeting, the conversation turned specifically to what kinds of wearable health monitoring systems could be game changers for improving how patients interact with their healthcare provider.
The consensus was that non-traditional research collaborations are required to get engineering faculty at the same table as the teams with influence on what flows into electronic health records.
At that moment, I felt something. The engineers, the physicians and Dean’s Council members – many with hard-won wisdom from industrial R&D experiences – all clicked onto the same wavelength.
There are huge opportunities to be created here.
In the coming months, we will stand up an institute for healthcare engineering here at the Jacobs School of Engineering. This institute will help to empower our Jacobs School faculty to partner with JCHI and others on projects aimed at delivering actionable information in healthcare contexts.
If you are inspired to learn more or get involved, please reach out. Behind the scenes work has begun, and I look forward to sharing much more next year.
I am confident about the prospects of success of this institute because I can see it building on research and educational strengths across every academic department in the Jacobs School as well as many centers including our ; ; ; and .
Looking across campus, it’s clear that this institute will be complementary to, and relevant for, the many efforts that bring medicine, health, engineering and computer science together including the and the with some of its focus on .
From my vantage point, grand challenges are almost never solved via one institute or another. It’s part of the Â鶹´«Ã½ magic that impactful efforts, and the people and ideas behind them, self assemble as a community of innovators.
If you are interested in getting involved in our efforts to bring academic engineering and computer science more directly into efforts to improve the practice of healthcare, please get in touch. Working together like this is how we make bold possible.
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As always, I can be reached at DeanPisano@ucsd.edu