Department of Health Promotion Methodology

Background The mission of the Department of Health Promotion Methodology is to represent in the higher education sector the healthy lifestyle and healthcare decision support solutions increasingly used on electronic devices; which is world-class in its form as an educational, research, knowledge and service center.

Education The department’s areas of expertise cover the basic knowledge of process-based and value-based healthcare as well as healthcare founded on evidence obtained in real life, with special emphasis on health promotion as function of health behavior, the processes of patient support, health planning, health care communication and health-cooperation, the user experience and health experience, the human-machine collaboration and service-planning responding to this, job competency development as well as device design.

In education, it is primarily adapted to the training programs of the Faculty, while it also plays a role in the training programs of other faculties. It makes its training materials available for medical and health sciences students of other domestic institutions.

Its research focuses on the areas of health promotion solutions and human-machine collaboration emerging with the development of technology, with its sub-themes being organization, analysis and evaluation, behavioral, social, planning and design.

Through its knowledge-sharing activities, it assumes an active role in disseminating knowledge about people-centered healthcare to both other disciplines and to the general public.

Through a wide range of collaborations, the University is developing health-promoting applications that can be used by the population.

Elective subject Basics of human-machine collaboration in healthcare

Aim of the course: To introduce the gradually emerging new health care “workforce”, the virtual health assistant, with the practical use of health support software and a mobile application. There is an IT platform used in the teaching, to which the students of the subject are given mobile application access for their own use and a book summarizing the knowledge base of the subject: Dr. Zoltán Lantos: Data from health. Road to a healthy data society.

Professional background of the subject: At present, data is our most important resource, and using it, many tasks and workflows can be automated. These are supported by the latest European developments with the creation of a single data space, the related cross-border technologies, and data sharing legislation, regulation of artificial intelligence and digital medical products and recommendations. The key factor is the unified health data space that is needed in order to collect the sufficient amount of data and the services based on it.At the same time, healthcare and health promotion are the service areas where all experts agree that the key role of man and personal relationship will remain for at least another hundred years, and that robots and automated IT tools will mostly provide support and quality improvement. Even in the often referred-to case of the diagnostic accuracy, learning algorithms are better than average diagnostics, but in comparative studies they are not better than the best-trained and most experienced professionals, and the best results are achieved by the teamwork of highly trained professionals and the machine.On the other hand, there are many workflows that machines can perform efficiently, and there are a number of health promotion processes where machines can support patients and healthy people with a high level of knowledge as an extended hand of health professionals.For artificial intelligence applications, a European requirement is the use of explainable artificial intellig ence (XAI), which supports both the traceability and comprehensibility of decisions. Transparency is also strengthened by the fact that all digital medicine products – software, applications, algorithms – must be licensed according to the European regulation of medical devices that came into force in 2021.It also follows that a virtual health assistant is a tool that can be safe, effective, and efficient as part of a human-machine collaboration, when developed to be part of  well-defined, thoroughly designed sub-processes that fit into complex health care and health promotion workflows.

Zoltán Tibor LANTOS PhD Associate Professor

Associate professor, Head of Department