Martin Curley

Healthcare systems around the world are currently facing mountainous pressures. From aging populations, to rising costs and workforce shortages, millions of patients are awaiting treatment. 

Maynooth University's Innovation Value Institute aims to offer a solution. Co-founded by Professor Martin Curley, its research represents a systematic attempt to reimagine and reshape healthcare delivery through technology.

“Our mission is to drive a structural change in the way companies and organisations and governments get value from technology,” explains Martin. “It's about solving real world problems, but also then contributing to and taking advantage of academic literature.”

COVID-19: Disrupting tradition in healthcare

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed rapid innovation at the Health Service Executive (HSE). Within 48 hours, his team co-developed and deployed remote monitoring solutions for patients with COVID, followed by real-time respiration rate monitoring that provided early warning of patient deterioration. 

“We put novel respiratory measurement technology into 23 hospitals in four months. One of our top clinical engineers said in peace time, that might've taken five years or never happened,” Martin says.

What the pandemic also highlighted is that traditional healthcare models, built around hospital-centric care and reactive treatment, are struggling to meet contemporary demands. In fact, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reports that half the global population lacks access to essential health services, while developed nations grapple with unsustainable cost increases. 

As a result, healthcare providers are increasingly turning to digital solutions, with the global digital health market reaching US$211bn according to Grand View Research.

Advancing the modern healthcare system

Maynooth University’s Institute is currently focusing on what Martin refers to as ‘Stay Left, Shift Left, 10X’. This approach prioritises keeping patients well at home, expediting hospital discharge and achieving tenfold improvements in healthcare metrics. 

“It is also about getting patients home from hospital as quickly as possible,” Martin explains. “The ‘10X’ refers to using digital to do things ten-times better, ten-times cheaper, ten-times better, ten-times earlier and ten-times higher volume.”

The framework draws from evidence gathered across 40 different healthcare scenarios, presented at the UN General Standard Digital Health Symposium and has evolved into what some healthcare publications now call "Curley's Law" - a principle suggesting that compounding 10X digital healthcare innovations can add an average of two-and-a-half years of healthy life for every five years of implementation. 

Similar to Moore’s Law for semiconductors, Curley’s law, whereby the application of Digital Technologies to healthcare consistently delivers 10X returns in terms of speed, cost-efficiency, and overall effectiveness is both an empirical observation and an aspiration goal/competitive challenge for the global healthcare industry.

“By using digital tools, we can make things cheaper, better, faster and most importantly, we can create better outcomes for patients,” Martin says.

Technology integration forms a core component of this transformation, with Maynooth University investigating use of AI for patient education and clinical support. Martin’s team advocates for healthcare delivery through smartphones, supported by IoT devices and AI assistance and agents. 

“AI coupled with the IoT and cloud computing is going to enable us to dramatically transform healthcare,” he says. “We can never guarantee successful outcomes, but there's a higher probability we'll have a healthier lifespan and that we can live longer and it'll be cheaper.”

Open Plan IT: Scaling the transformation roadmap

Maynooth University’s approach to patient engagement follows a structured progression from engagement to enablement, education, empowerment and excellence. As part of this approach, the university is partnered with Open Plan IT, a UK-based social enterprise that specialises in open-source healthcare solutions. 

“We have the privilege of working with Open Plan IT and they have stood up a completely new digital health platform, primarily based on open source software to allow distributed network centric care of patients with really complex needs,” Martin says.

“This is providing next generation capabilities for clinical teams, also enabling them to have real time multidisciplinary team discussions on patients or outbreaks.”

Martin explains they are currently working on a significant disruptive technology research grant proposal that they will be in early 2025. 

"Our short-term ambitious target is to transform Ireland, but then to take that system and build what we call a design pattern and go to other countries and deploy these solutions," he says.

"Transforming an industry is really hard but we are aided by the Open Innovation 2.0 paradigm. To support transformation efforts we host an annual Digital Health Symposium during the UN General Assembly in New York and an international Digital Health Summer school at Maynooth University to help educate and radically co-innovate a new kind of health system.  

“It's not just about research, but also about cohesive emergent co-innovation.”

To read the full article in the magazine, click HERE.

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