NIH Funds Project to Use Digital Twins to Advance Health Equity

CC BY-SA 4.0 – HealthMonitor

A group of researchers at the Cleveland Clinic have been awarded a grant from the US National Institutes of Health totaling $3.14 million. The project will look at advancing health equity efforts using digital twins, simulated patients built from pools of real-world data (RWD) whose details, like social determinants of health (SDoH) mirror participants in trials.

According to Alicia Reale-Cooney, “In the new grant, the team will initially build the infrastructure for “Digital Twin Neighborhoods,” synthesizing de-identified health information from electronic health records which will include some information on social determinants of health, or aspects of a patient’s life that might influence health education and outcomes as they age. These virtual neighborhoods, digital replicas of real communities, including biological, social and geographic information, expand access to data and algorithms for understanding place-based health and social inequalities..”

To read more, click here.

(Source: Newsroom, February 21^st, 2023)