1 PhD position in Health Analytics in Netherlands | Utrecht University

Job description

The Faculty of Science of Utrecht University has a vacancy for a Ph.D position in the OPERAM Horizon2020 project. OPERAM is an acronym for Optimising therapy to prevent Avoidable hospital admissions in the Multimorbid elderly. It has received funding within the European Horizon2020 Research and Innovation action Personalising health and care, subcall PHC 17-2014: Comparing the effectiveness of existing healthcare interventions in the elderly.

The OPERAM consortium consists of nine participants from Switserland, Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Greece, Italy and Germany. OPERAM is centred around a multicentre large-scale cluster randomised clinical trial (RCT) of an intervention designed to optimise pharmacotherapy and to enhance drug compliance versus usual care. This intervention is operationalised through the STRIP Assistant (STRIPA), a user-friendly rule-based clinical decision support system (CDSS).

STRIPA development started in 2010 and the Saas software is now ready to be used in daily practice in primary care within the Netherlands. The OPERAM UU-PhD student will, in collaboration with the OPERAM UU-postdoc, extend STRIPA to capture patients’ data and provide clinicians with the necessary information to optimise the individual patient’s drug therapy, highlight ADR risk, and indicate the cheapest drug brand available. Output datasets will include correctness of drug indications, potential prescribing omissions of beneficial drugs, instances of potentially inappropriate medications, presence of ADRs, potential adverse drug interactions, a list of generic drugs to consider, and dosing advice. STRIPA needs to uniformly support hospital sites in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, and Belgium. It will be advantageous if you already understand the local languages, though not required.

This is a Semantic Interoperability & Data Analytics PhD position. The PhD’s tasks will revolve around semantic interoperability engineering to accomodate the various national classification standards within one European-wide application, in both primary and secondary care domains, and data analytics for personalised prescription support.

The candidate is expected to:

• complete and defend a PhD thesis within the nominal time-frame;
• regularly present intermediate research results at our internal colloquium and at international workshops and conferences;
• collaborate with the other researchers in the project;
• participate in the organization of research activities and events such as conferences, workshops and symposia;
• assist in teaching activities.

Requirements

The candidate should have an MSc in Information or Computer Science, be highly motivated, speak and write English well, and be proficient in producing scientific reports. He/she should ideally be proficient in and be enthousiastic about:

• web engineering in Java and JavaScript;
• rule-based knowledge systems;
• information architecture;
• data analytics applications;
• software-based health care innovations.

The OPERAM project will start on May 1, 2015. You need not apply if you are unavailable before August 1.

Conditions of employment

The candidate is offered a full-time position for four years. Salary starts at € 2,125.- and increases to € 2,717.- gross per month in the fourth year of the appointment. The salary is supplemented with a holiday bonus of 8% and an end-of-year bonus of 8,3% per year. In addition we offer: a pension scheme, a partially paid parental leave, flexible employment conditions. Conditions are based on the Collective Labour Agreement Dutch Universities. The research group will provide the candidate with necessary support on all aspects of the project.

Organisation

Utrecht University has great ambitions for its teaching quality and study success rates. This also applies to its clear research profiles which are centred around four themes: Dynamics of Youth, Institutions, Life Sciences and Sustainability. Utrecht University plays a prominent role in our society and contributes to finding the answers to topical and future societal issues.

The Faculty of Science consists of six departments: Biology, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Information and Computing Sciences, Physics and Astronomy, Chemistry and Mathematics. The Faculty is home to 3500 students and nearly 2000 staff and is internationally renowned for the quality of its research. The Faculty's academic programmes reflect developments in today's society.

The Department of Information and Computing Sciences is nationally and internationally renowned for its research in computer science and information science. The research of the department is grouped into four divisions: Software Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Worlds, and Interaction Technology. Its research focus is on Game Technology, one of the four research focus areas of the Faculty of Science. Both the Department and the Faculty strive to strengthen the research in computer science and information science with applications in gaming technology.

The Department offers bachelor programs in computer science and information science, and four English-language research master-programs in Artificial Intelligence, Business Informatics, Computing Science, and Game and Media Technology. High enrollment figures and good student ratings make the education very successful.

The research group of Software Production is part of the Software Systems division in the department of Information and Computer Science. The division Software Systems investigates all aspects of software: the technologies to describe, construct, and adapt software systems, and their architecture, engineering, and deployment. One of the Software Production group’s research lines focuses on knowledge discovery applications in the healthcare sector.