Cleveland Clinic to Leverage Digital Twins for Health Disparity Research

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded researchers from Cleveland Clinic and MetroHealth a $3.14 million grant to use digital twins to better understand and address health disparities.

Digital twins in healthcare are defined as “virtual representations (“digital twin”) of patients (“physical twin”) that are generated from multimodal patient data, population data, and real-time updates on patient and environmental variables.”

Cleveland Clinic’s digital twin models will be built from 250,000 patients’ EHR data. The models will be used to analyze health trends, including complex economic, environmental, and social factors that can lead to health disparities, according to the press release.

“Where a person lives or works can shape their health outcomes – including life expectancy and risk of developing diseases like cancer or diabetes. Americans from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities are more likely to have heart attacks and stroke, and are expected to live 10 fewer years than wealthier Americans,” said Jarrod Dalton, PhD, director of Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Populations Health Research, in the press release. “Our goal is to design an approach to help health systems, governments and organizations collaborate and strategize ways to address clear disparities.”

Using the new grant, the researchers will build the infrastructure for “Digital Twin Neighborhoods” by synthesizing de-identified EHR data and information on social determinants of health (SDOH). These virtual neighborhoods will mirror real communities in terms of geographic, social, and biological characteristics, which may help expand access to data and algorithms for understanding various health inequities.

From there, the researchers will use the tool on multiple projects to evaluate its effectiveness, including “assessing regional mental health initiatives on a neighborhood level; evaluating the potential impacts of introducing new services on heart disease burden in communities; and evaluating how frequent and/or economically-driven relocations of residence affect health outcomes,” the press release states.

“This project aims to chart a new course for understanding place-based population health strategies and improving health outcomes,” said Adam Perzynski, PhD, of MetroHealth’s Population Health Research Institute (PHRI), in the press release. “Evaluating technology like digital twins in the research space can make it easier for organizations to take a data-backed approach to public health interventions. Instead of building these models from scratch, other health systems and organizations can adapt the framework for their own needs.”

This research builds on the team’s previous work, which highlighted how the neighborhood where people reside might be linked with the risk of cardiovascular events after finding that people from socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods had major cardiovascular events at more than twice the rates predicted by traditional risk assessment tools.

Dalton noted that neighborhood-based disparities such as these are severe, creating a significant population health concern for the two health systems and the communities they serve.

“We’re committed to supporting lifelong health for our patients and the communities where they reside,” said Serpil Erzurum, MD, Cleveland Clinic’s chief research and academic officer, in the press release. “To help us begin to address and treat the root causes of disease, we need to understand what has led us to this point. Using innovative approaches like digital twin communities is the future of population research, and it will reveal how we can better address health disparities to make positive changes in our communities.”