Luka Petravić, MD: Medical data reuse: a series of short stories

The American Slovenian Education Foundation, in collaboration with LokalPatriot Institute, organized a science lecture on Wednesday, May 22. The lecture was held by Luka Petravić, MD, ASEF Junior Fellow 2023, a young doctor who has passed the basic license exam and is about to choose a specialty. He conducted his research visit in ASEF Mentor Dr Luka Pocivavsek‘s laboratory in Chicago. 

Luka Petravić presented interesting projects in which he has been able to create added value with data. Firstly, he presented the Personal Doctor Finder project from the Scientific Association Sledilnik, which won the DigiVzornik Award for outstanding contribution to the digital transformation of society and the SozialMarie Award for social innovation. He stressed that the project aimed to improve the accessibility of data and easier user experience, especially for senior citizens. The data is updated on a regular basis, attracting around 40,000 unique users per month.

He then presented the SiOHCA project, an interdisciplinary project of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Maribor, which aims to develop freely available software to help monitor and analyse out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. The project has piloted a registry of cardiac arrests in Slovenia.

Luka Petravić also highlighted the eCREAM emergency room digitisation research project, which uses data on emergency room attendance to identify trends that could be used to predict how many doctors and nurses would be needed on standby at a given time in the future. He added that Slovenia has the advantage of being small and having a single national triage system. 

At the end of the lecture, he used a concrete example of aortic arch research to show the advantages of computer simulations in medicine. He told us more about his research visit to the University of Chicago and his visit to the Congress on Academic Surgery in Washington. The lecture raised questions about the openness/accessibility of data in medicine, and the debate focused on the differences in accessibility between countries.

The event was coordinated by Tadej Krivec,  ASEF Junior Fellow 2021.

The ASEF Young Minds project is supported by the Office of the Republic of Slovenia for Youth and the Government Office for Slovenians Abroad.