Sabine is a Professor of Health Informatics in the Division of Informatics, Imaging, and Data Sciences. Trained in Health Informatics at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands), her research focuses on developing, evaluating and implementing digital health technologies to collect and use patient-generated health data to improve care, equity, and outcomes for people living with long-term conditions.

She co-leads the Remote Monitoring of Rheumatoid Arthritis (REMORA) programme. This includes a £2.1m research study funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), which aims to improve outpatient consultations by enabling people with rheumatoid arthritis to collect and share daily symptom reports with health care staff to give them more detailed information on how patients have felt in the weeks and months between appointments.

Sabine has a longstanding and ongoing collaboration with UK kidney patient and professional organisations and policy makers. Her research has informed permanent changes to the national audit scheme by incorporating data on patient-reported experiences and outcomes to enrich clinical audit data. This included the development of a patient-reported experience measure, which was adopted by the UK Kidney Association to inform service improvements and has been completed by over 100,000 patients. More recently, she led the development and write-up of a long-term plan to achieve large-scale collection of electronic patient-reported outcome data for people with kidney disease in the UK. The final plan has been widely endorsed, including by the UK Kidney Association, who have established a national working group to drive the plan’s implementation.

Other roles that Sabine fulfils include:

• Academic lead for the University of Manchester's Digital Futures Health theme
• Deputy lead of the Digital Health theme for the Applied Research Collaboration Greater Manchester
• Digital Health Equity lead for the University of Manchester's Christabel Pankhurst Institute for health technology research and innovation
• Editorial board member for BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Digital technology is everywhere, affecting many aspects of our daily lives. This includes impacting on how we manage our health and interact with the healthcare system: apps to keep track of our diet, a Fitbit to count our steps, a web portal to look at our own medical record, or a video call with our GP.

For many people, digital health technology is a good thing. It helps them to live more healthily, gives them better access to NHS services if they need them, and improves the relationship with their doctor.

But, unfortunately, this is not the case for everyone. For example, people who are older, poorer, less highly educated, or from an ethnic minority background may not have the skills, confidence, or support to use digital technology for their health. At the same time, they are also more likely to have poorer health and more problems to get the care they need. Introducing digital technology may make this worse.

To address this, Sabine's team is working on gaining a deeper understanding about what specific groups of people expect and need from digital health technology, and developing and testing solutions accordingly so that further digitisation of health and healthcare will make things better for everyone, irrespective of their backgrounds.

Here are some recent examples of Sabine's work in this area:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40817223/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39723998/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36753324/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39529006/

 https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/view/CRD42023480936

Sabine teaches on the joint UoM-UCL MSc Health Informatics programme, where she is a (co-)lead tutor on the following two course units:

• Health Information Systems and Technologies
• Personal Health Informatics

She is also the academic lead responsible for organising and improving graduate teaching assistant support for all teaching programmes across the Division of Informatics, Imaging, and Data Sciences.

Post-docs

Mustafa Ali

Susan Moschogianis

Asieh Yousefnejad Shomali

PhD students (ongoing)

Nourah Basalem (since 2024)

Cultural Tailoring of Digital Pain Management Approaches: Enhancing Equity and management of Musculoskeletal Pain in Diverse Populations in Saudi Arabia

Michelo Banda (since 2023)

Exploring Treatment Response in People Living with Rheumatoid Arthritis Using Daily Patient Reported Symptom Data Collected Through Smartphones

Darcy Murphy (since 2022)

Identifying spatial and temporal pain profiles to identify disease type and progression from the Manchester Digital Pain Manikin

Ayobami Olanrewaju (since 2022)

Patterns of Physical activity pre- and post-total knee replacement, assessed through the linkage of NHS and consumer health and fitness tracker data

Yanan Ma (since 2022)

Understanding Young People's Use of Social Media  in Type 1 Diabetes Self-Care

PhD students (completed)

Kuan Liao (2024)

Patient-reported outcomes as a predictive factor to inform treatment decisions in non-small cell lung cancer patients treated with immunotherapy

Norina Gaststeiger (2023)

Virtual reality and augmented reality for upskilling care home workers in hand hygiene practice: A realist evaluation

Kate Law (2023)

Personalising follow-up for adolescent and young adult survivors of central nervous system tumours through better understanding and assessment of patients’ needs

Videha Sharma (2023)

The role of health information technology in the management of clinical data in kidney transplantation

Julie Gandrup (2022)

The use of Digital Patient-Generated Health Data to Support Clinical Care and Research in Musculoskeletal Disease

Wouter Gude (2019)

Understanding and optimising electronic audit and feedback to improve quality of care

Paolo Fraccaro (2017)

Context-aware computing of actionable information using electronic health records data

• Design and evaluation of health informatics interventions
• Health equity impact assessments
• Inclusive research practices
• Mixed-methods research methods
• Systematic reviews
• Development of digital health measurement tools (clinimetrics)
• Implementation science frameworks
• Epidemiology

• Patient-generated health data
• Digital health equity
• Cultural tailoring of digital health interventions
• Implementation of digital health innovations into clinical pathways and systems
• mHealth
• Patient portals and personal health records
• Symptom reporting
• Health measurement
• Management of long-term conditions