University College Dublin Clinical Research Centre (UCD CRC) was established in 2006 to design and conduct high quality, world class, patient-centred clinical research. Vertice is an Oracle implementation partner specializing in end-to-end Data for AI solutions. The two organizations have worked together successfully for several years on a variety of projects to support scientific research ranging from space to medicine.
Capturing the patient voice
Together with Vertice, UCD CRC has built a number of solutions, one of which is an AI application for people with asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Colm McMahon, Executive Director at UCD CRC, explains, “When you’re suffering with a chronic condition it’s with you for life. Typically, your opportunity to share your lived experience is short because appointments are just 5 or 10 minutes long, and the time between appointments can be weeks or months. It’s quite difficult to capture the patient’s voice accurately and completely in such a condensed setting as a single appointment with a physician. Yet it’s crucial for physicians treating patients to be able to blend the patient’s voice, the clinical data from treatment protocols, and other environmental data affecting their condition—pollen counts, the weather, humidity, and air quality, for example.”
The challenge was finding a way to capture the patient experience naturally—anytime, anywhere, in the moment when it’s happening—while also ensuring the Data for AI solution followed norms for optimised data solutions and governance.
Blending the patient’s voice with clinical and environmental data
Tony Cassidy is founder and CEO of Vertice. He explained, “Not only did UCD need a conversational, agentic application experience for patients, but to help researchers, the application data needs to be blended with clinical data from the patient’s treatment protocol and several sets of environmental data. We chose Oracle AI Data Platform (AIDP) because it has both the breadth and depth we needed for this. AIDP unites industry-leading foundational models with governed enterprise data so developers can rapidly and easily build their enterprise lakehouse, AI agents, and applications—and it enables users to effortlessly use agentic experiences.”
The two companies developed an AI companion application to capture the patient voice. Patients are now more accustomed to conversational interfaces like ChatGPT, so talking to the AI application about their experience is more natural, and it’s available to them any time, any place to help record when they’ve had an incident or a flare-up in their condition, such as “I felt breathless this morning”. The interface allows patients to naturally communicate their daily experiences and receive trusted guidance in real time. It uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to correlate what the patient is saying with clinical and environmental data in the platform, to give personalized suggestions to help manage their symptoms in real time—for example: “The air quality was generally good in your location today, but the pollen count is higher than normal. That could be why you’re feeling breathless. If possible, stay inside until conditions improve, expected this evening.” It can also share resources, like the asthma action plan from the Asthma Society of Ireland, for additional guidance and support.
For the clinical perspective, two leading physician experts in respiratory medicine selected asthma and COPD as the use case. UCD CRC handled the research requirements and designed the study, while Vertice handled the technical aspects of the project, freeing clinicians to evaluate the nuances of patients’ experience and share observations and pathways with the technical team.
McMahon said, “It was an excellent partnership, and Vertice managed to get a pilot up and running quite quickly. Now we’re looking to see how we can scale it. We’re in the process of standardizing a lot of our data sets using common data models. That’s one thing AIDP allowed us to do—some of the new AI tools allowed us to accelerate the development of that chatbot and the analysis and reporting functionality.”
Scaling up and the future
Cassidy expanded, “At present, we’re using synthetic patient data in the pilot. But as we scale the solution, we will need a very secure platform that can store real patient data with full governance and oversight. When dealing with sensitive patient data, trust is non-negotiable. I think that’s a key strength of AIDP. Oracle are very well known for their security, and I think that’s a key differentiator for us.”
AI is another differentiator, especially for exploring the large, varied data that comes from the spoken records of multiple patients. AIDP enables developers to blend conversational information captured with the AI application with environmental data to create a unique new dataset of patient-reported outcomes. This data complements clinical data and enables clinicians to track the bigger picture over time, in support of longitudinal research through analytics to optimise care pathways in chronic disease treatment. AI is particularly useful in exploring data to find patterns, spot trends or anomalies, and enables clinicians to use natural language. For example, they can say “tell me what’s going on in this data that might help me improve my patient’s care” and get a response that is particular to the specific patient’s history, triggers, and needs.
Looking forward, McMahon noted that the first use cases are COPD and respiratory disease analysis, but that UCD CRC conducts many trials using patient data. “Always there is a need to capture the patient’s lived experience alongside the clinical data. So we’ve an abundance of potential additional use cases, and they all rely on the same architecture in the framework that we’ve developed with AIDP and with our partner, Vertice.”
In finishing, McMahon had this to say, “I think this is an excellent example of a solution that brings together the hospital setting, the community setting, and patients’ real lives. They can capture their own experience and share it with clinicians in a way that empowers patients to better manage their own condition, and helps the clinicians provide a better standard of care. It’s all about a better standard of care for patients.”
Learn More
Learn more about University College Dublin Clinical Research Centre (UCD CRC), Vertice, and AIDP – and you can always ask questions in the Oracle AI & Analytics Community.