Digital Health and Patient-Centred Medicine – What Should We Know?

This event, which was one of the first in the last 18 months to welcome back in-person participants as well as those online, had one question at its core: what do we need to know about digital health and patient-centred medicine?

The reason behind this year’s Open Day was, in the words of Champalimaud Clinical Centre breast surgeon Pedro Gouveia, “to answer some of the key questions that healthcare systems, patients and medical staff face with new emerging technologies within the digital health space”. He continued, “The convergence of human and artificial intelligence in medicine is enabling patients to process their own data to promote health; or, when facing a disease, it could have the potential to predict adverse events that ultimately could have a major impact on the patient’s journey during treatment, as in chemotherapy. Moreover, cognitive digital therapy could improve quality of life and help patients to return to a normal life after stressful events like cancer.”

As well as experts from our own Breast Unit, several invited speakers joined the Open Day. One of which was Pedro Pereira Rodrigues, Director of the PhD Program in Health Data Science, and researcher at the AI4Health group of CINTESIS, at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto. On defining artificial intelligence and its importance in modern medicine, Prof. Rodrigues said, “AI involves systems designed by humans to achieve complex goals that involve perception, reasoning, learning and actions in a virtual or physical world. Being inherently learning systems, current and future applications for healthcare will take advantage of real-world routinely-collected health data but, simultaneously, should take into account the multiple biases possibly existent in collected datasets, to prevent automatic propagation of any discriminatory decision processes.”

Champalimaud Foundation President Leonor Beleza welcomed the speakers and guests, thanked the participants, both presencial and virtual, and explained that the Open Day aimed to explore how AI and other autonomous or automatic processes could be used in a cancer-specific setting, highlighting that the psychological aspects of this new modality may be just as important to consider as the physiological. 

(8 - 28 minutes) After a brief introduction by the Champalimaud Centre’s Breast Unit Director, Fatima Cardoso, there was a presentation on how artificial intelligence can change medicine and healthcare, delivered by Pedro Pereira Rodrigues, who was keen to discuss the limitations of using AI in healthcare. Far from pessimistic, the idea behind exploring these limitations was to ensure the best possible use of these new tools, without raising expectations beyond what is reasonable. Greater work must be done, both in terms of improving the technology, as well as in fully utilising the collected data.

(28 - 51 minutes - Presentation in English with Portuguese subtitles) Timo Schinkothe from Cologne University then gave his presentation on how electronic platforms may improve patient reported outcomes. He explained the importance of listening to the patients themselves, and learning how to ask the correct questions and understand the answers that the patients give, through his own experience of using the CANKADO system. This technology can help patients to detect or describe their symptoms and understand which symptoms are important to discuss through the use of a personalised diary and artificial intelligence. 

(51 - 1h55) Following these presentations, there was a round table discussion, with questions ranging from “What benefits can this technology have in terms of health care?” and “Can cancer screening be replaced by deep machine learning methods?” to “How can we make this new highly technological language understandable and accessible to patients?” As well as members of the Champalimaud Foundation’s Breast Unit, Research and Ethics teams, the participants included Maria de Belém Roseira, former Minister of Health, Marina Borges, Planning and Management Support, IPO, Porto, and the aforementioned Pedro Pereira Rodrigues. We were also privileged to welcome a breast cancer survivor, Paula Viana, from Porto Polytechnic, who offered a unique insight into how these processes are seen from the perspective of the patient. The final questions of the day came from the audience, where a Champalimaud Centre nurse expressed some cogent concerns about the ability of patients to be able to use and understand this new technology independently, without putting a greater strain on nursing staff. Fatima Cardoso described this as ‘a good way to end the panel discussion,’ summarising that “It is important to understand that Artificial Intelligence is not a machine to replace doctors and nurses, but it is a machine to help doctors and nurses to better provide health care.”

On the same day as the Open Day, but in the morning, the Breast Unit also hosted the 4th edition of the European Project BOUNCE: Predicting Effective Adaptation to Breast Cancer to Help Women BOUNCE Back. This funded project was developed to explore factors that influence breast cancer patients’ long-term psychological resilience and their capacity to resume a normal everyday life and work, following breast cancer treatments. 

Just another busy and exciting day at the Champalimaud Centre’s Breast Unit!

Visit the Champalimaud Foundation YouTube page to watch all of our available events, including the Open Day video. 

List of Breast Unit Open Day speakers and panelists

Dr. Fatima Cardoso, MD - Director of the Breast Unit, Champalimaud Foundation
Prof. Maria João Cardoso, MD, PhD - Head Breast Surgeon, Breast Unit, Champalimaud Foundation
Dr. Berta Sousa, MD - Medical Oncologist, Breast Unit, Champalimaud Foundation
Maria de Belém Roseira, Lawyer - Former Portuguese Minister of Health
Paula Martinho da Silva, Lawyer - Ethics Committee, Champalimaud Foundation
Prof. John Krakauer, PhD - Cognitive-Motor Interface Lab, Champalimaud Research
Prof. Timo Schinkothe, MD, PhD - CANKADO & Clinical eHealth Research Group, Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU)
Prof. Marina Borges, PhD - Planning and Management Support; Management, Results and Economics in Healthcare Group, IPO Porto
Dr. Pedro Gouveia, MD - Breast Unit Surgeon; Immersive Lab, Champalimaud Foundation
Prof. Pedro Pereira Rodrigues, PhD - Doctoral Programme in Health Data Science, Faculty of Medicine, Porto University
Paula Viana, Phd - Porto Polytechnic, INESC TEC

Edited by John Lee, content developer of the Champalimaud Foundation.