IUCRC Phase I Baylor College of Medicine: Center to Stream Healthcare In Place (C2SHIP)

Chronic health conditions are financially and emotionally costly. Immediate action is needed to shift from current practice, in which frequently the patient is a passive recipient of care to empower patients to have a central active role in self-managing their health. The Center to Stream Healthcare In Place (C2SHIP) unites the best minds in academic medicine and bioengineering with leaders in biomedical industry to research, develop and promote in-place care technologies for fertilizing a patient engagement ecosystem.

The University of Arizona serves as the C2SHIP Lead Site with Partner Sites being University of Southern California, Baylor College of Medicine, and California Institute of Technology. The Center will accelerate innovation through partnerships, multi-specialty collaborations, resource sharing, and preparing an educated workforce to promote wellness through self-care technologies.

The Center’s trans-disciplinary team will pursue research and development in new material-based sensors, reconfigurable designs, system integration, intelligent data mining, and comprehensive data visualization. Through “Digital Health”, patient data can be streamed to medical professionals at remote locations, establishing a mobile hub for vulnerable patients in their own home, and personalizing care coordination.

C2SHIP will focus on mitigating physiological, environmental, and psychological changes for timely management and intervention. Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) will focus on the clinical medicine aspect of the Center, accelerating translation of cutting-edge technologies to patients in-place, while training students and fellows in remote patient care.

The Center will accelerate knowledge and intellectual property transfer between academia and industry through collaborative partnerships. This will promote rapid development of new technologies, and transform health care delivery by enhancing the quality of life of chronically-ill patients while reducing health care costs and preventing hospitalizations.

Student engagement in the proposed research projects will create opportunities with Center companies and organizations, and provide multidisciplinary participation at C2SHIP conferences and workshops. BCM C2SHIP will recruit students and engage faculty in medicine, biomedical engineering, allied health. BCM promotes an inclusive environment, allowing the Center to engage underrepresented individuals from diverse backgrounds.

Data produced from the projects will be housed in Center-wide servers at the C2SHIP Center using a password protected Box data sharing folder. Box is a cloud computing business which provides file-sharing, collaborating, and other tools for working with files that are uploaded to its servers. Data will be maintained for five years.

BCM C2SHIP projects that collect patient data will be approved by BCM IRB prior to project onset. All data will be deidentified, with no personal identifiers recorded or retained in any form.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.