Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.A consortium of 12 European universities has embarked on an ambitious project to better prepare health workers for a digital future. The initiative, Sustainable Healthcare with Digital Health Data Competence, or Susa for short, was launched in January with €12.4mn of funding from the EU’s Digital Europe programme. It covers the education of doctors and nurses through bachelors and masters degrees, and life-long learning for established health professionals. Minna Isomursu, Susa project leader and professor at the University of Oulu in Finland, calls it “a pivotal moment for European healthcare education”. “We are creating a workforce that can harness digital health data to revolutionise patient care, improve efficiency and contribute to a more sustainable and equitable healthcare system,” she says.If they don’t have the skills, the technologies will not be used, however beautiful they seemDigital healthcare already spans a vast and varied range of applications. They include: computer examination of X-ray scans using artificial intelligence to detect abnormalities; mobile apps for people to monitor themselves for medical conditions; distant health counselling through text messaging; and electronic recording by doctors and nurses of patient notes using voice recognition.Susa was born out of Isomursu’s research on integrating digital technologies into care pathways. “I found that one of the main obstacles was that health professionals lacked the required skills and competencies,” she says. “If they don’t have the skills, the technologies will not be used, however beautiful they seem.”A parallel problem, Isomursu suggests, is that “digital technologies are currently developed by engineers and technologists without healthcare professionals, who are not involved because they lack the required competencies. This is slowing down the innovation process because health workers are not involved from the beginning.”To help tackle this difficulty, Susa has enlisted five small and medium-sized technology and health data companies from Finland, Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Belgium in the project. “They will provide their insights when we create content for teaching the students and they will also offer internships for students to pick up practical knowledge and hands-on experience,” says Corinna Uhr, project manager at Oulu. “This mobility aspect — the opportunity to learn through an exchange programme or an internship in another country — will be valuable for the students.”Susa’s 12 partner universities in nine countries will put digital skills at the heart of 20 bachelors and 26 masters programmes, aiming to produce 6,558 graduates by the end of the four-year project. There will also be 16 life-long learning modules to make 660 mid-career professionals proficient in digital healthcare.The need for better targeted and more extensive digital training is felt throughout the health sector, public and private, says Lynne Green, a consultant clinical psychologist and chief clinical officer at Kooth, a UK-based company providing digital mental support to young people. She welcomes the launch of Susa. “There isn’t a clear academic pathway for people working in digital health tech,” Green says. “When people come to us, we do our own digital health training. But we want to take that to the next level and get some accredited training with an academic institution that many people can access.”Our biggest challenge is building rapport and relationships in a digital settingMental health practitioners often find it hard to move from traditional face-to-face or telephone counselling to text-based digital interactions on mobile phones, says Green. “You cannot just transfer the skills,” she adds. “We may have to retrain staff in some of the basics — how to engage with someone digitally.”Mastering the technology itself is not the most important issue in preparing health workers for the digital age, because people can learn the technicalities of operating the system with relative ease, Green adds: “Our biggest challenge is building rapport and relationships in a digital setting.” In the Susa EU project, the emphasis will vary according to the subject matter. For nursing programmes, digital interactions with patients may be most important, says Isomursu. On the other hand, biomedical engineering students developing a new device have no direct connection with patients and need to focus on the technology of measuring a biological signal. But they still need to know how health professionals will use the device in the clinic.The Susa consortium is building its educational materials around “20 learning objectives that are essential advanced digital skills for all health professionals working with health data regardless of their disciplinary background.” Five of Susa’s learning objectives focus on artificial intelligence, including its ethics, regulation and technology — an area largely missing from today’s courses.Susa will share the materials developed during the programme, not only within the original group of 12 founding institutions but also with other universities that have already expressed an interest in joining the project, says Isomursu.At Kooth, Green advocates teaching an attitude of “cautious enthusiasm” while exercising restraint towards applying AI. “It’s not going away so we need people with experience to see how we can use it effectively, safely and with really good governance,” she argues.“There are certainly areas in which AI brings real benefits, for example in summarising case notes and helping clinicians with administrative tasks so they can get on with things they are trained to do with patients,” she adds. “But we’re not going down the chatbot route [in digital therapy] any time soon . . . You do need to have a human with experience to oversee what the computer is doing.”
