New UKZN study ‘could transform patient care’
UKZN's College of Health Sciences says a new study, which will use data from patients at a Durban hospital, has the potential to transform patient care.
The 'Discover Me South Africa' study launched on Wednesday in collaboration with the KZN Health Department, Omnigen Biodata and Inkosi Albert Luthuli Hospital, amongst others.
It aims to enrol up to 100 000 people from Durban and will span over the next two years.
"It can change the way we approach patient care and health, in other others we are moving to what is called 'personalised care', and in our words, one size does not fit all and each individual is different," says Co-Chief Investigator Professor Ayesha Motala.
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Motala says the study aims to analyse electronic health and genetic information of enrolled patients at the hospital.
Motala says the data will provide them with an opportunity to understand better and predict the risks of disease.
She says the findings will transform patient care by improving the accuracy of diagnoses, earlier detection of disease, and enable the development of more targeted personalised treatment.
"Inkosi Albert Luthuli Hospital is the only hospital that has a fully integrated electronic health record system, and what this allows is for retrieving data on the patient's health conditions and then combining it with genomic data.
"This is what we call discovery science. In other words, it is going towards what is called personalised medicine."
