National Institutes of Health awarded the Cleveland Clinic a $3.14M grant to deploy "digital twins" to tackle healthcare disparities based on someone's residence.
Researchers from Cleveland Clinic and the Cleveland-based MetroHealth aim to use this information to develop strategies to reduce these health outcomes disparities.
The researcher will leverage digital twins built from electronic health records to analyze a registry of 250,000 patients from the health systems.
- Digital twins technology will facilitate the accurate representation of complex economic, environmental, and social aspects influencing disparities between neighboring communities.
- The team will initially build the infrastructure for "Digital Twin Neighborhoods" using data from electronic health records.
- These neighborhoods are digital replicas of real communities, which include social and geographic data, to analyze place-based health and social inequalities.
- According to Dr. Perzynski of the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI), "technology like digital twins in the research space can make it easier for organizations to take a data-backed approach to public health interventions."
