The Mohn Centre hears from Dr Arrash Yassaee on his PhD research and recent poster prize win.

The need to look outside your own field of research to find new approaches is at the core of our mission at the Mohn Centre for Children’s Health and Wellbeing. This continued interest in innovation as a means of helping patients and communities is shared by Dr Arrash Yassaee.

Arrash is a paediatric registrar currently pursuing his PhD in digital health within Imperial's School of Public Health. Alongside his clinical role, Arrash has spent the last three years working in the medtech industry, leading the research and development for a global digital health company headquartered in London. We hear from Arrash and celebrate his recent first place win in Imperial’s School of Public Health Symposium poster presentations.

Digital health is a growing industry, with more and more medical devices being released every week. However, this can lead to a very fragmented experience for patients and clinical teams, who often have to navigate between multiple apps and tools for different conditions. One approach to solve this problem is to develop a single technology platform which can then be configured to meet the needs of a range of different care pathways and patient groups. These are often called Disease Agnostic Platforms.

My research focuses on how to evaluate these new technologies. Whilst these new digital tools offer an exciting improvement for patients, providers and health systems, there remain several questions of how we benchmark and monitor this type of technology. There are many digital health frameworks suitable to evaluate technology with a specific use-case (e.g. Improving chronic diabetes management, supporting patients with asthma exacerbations etc.) but it is not clear how, if at all, this can be adjusted for technology which tries to cover ALL disease areas. However, if a validated approach can be developed, this would offer regulators, providers and patients, a standardised way to appraise and choose between these new platform technologies, improving standards, quality and transparency in digital health.

At a recent Imperial College PhD Symposium, I presented my PhD research and work to date. Students in the first half of their PhD were asked to present a poster, and have their work reviewed by colleagues and leading academic across the School of Public Health. I was delighted to be recognised with achieving first-place in the poster prize for this work with support from my supervisors Dr Dougal Hargreaves, Dr Ana Luisa Neves and Professor Azeem Majeed.

This win recognises the importance of this topic and the breadth of research which can be pursued at Imperial. I’m looking forward to continuing my research journey with support from my colleagues.