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Speaker: Ana Rita Londral

Title: "Collaborative approaches to design intelligent healthcare services that deliver high value to patients and health systems."

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Abstract: Healthcare systems are facing increasing pressure to deliver better outcomes with finite resources. Intelligent technologies—particularly those enabling risk prediction, personalization, and care optimization—are promising to support healthcare systems, but their impact will depend on how they are conceived, developed, and implemented within real-world services.
I will present research projects centered on the co-design, co-development, and co-implementation of intelligent tools for healthcare. These initiatives integrate predictive models, decision-support systems, and personalized care pathways developed in close collaboration with patients, multidisciplinary healthcare teams, hospital administrators, and technology partners. The approach is bottom-up and participatory: stakeholders jointly define relevant outcomes, identify meaningful data sources, and assess value from clinical, organizational, and patient perspectives.
The talk will illustrate how collaborative design improves model relevance, adoption, and sustainability. Patients contribute to defining outcomes that matter; clinicians shape workflow integration and interpretability requirements; administrators evaluate resource allocation and system-level impact. Researchers and developers translate these inputs into robust, ethical, and scalable solutions. The resulting evidence informs policymakers on best practices for high-value care, and may support top-down deployment of digital solutions.

Speaker's Short Bio: Ana Rita Londral is an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering at NOVA School of Science and Technology and Executive and Scientific Director of the Value for Health CoLAB. She holds a PhD in Biomedical Sciences and has built her career at the intersection of biomedical engineering, assistive technologies, and digital health innovation. Her early research focused on assistive communication technologies and biosignal-based human–computer interfaces for neurodegenerative conditions. She currently leads interdisciplinary research in AI-driven decision support, remote patient monitoring, health data analytics, and value-based healthcare. She has contributed to multiple national and European R&D projects, translating engineering research into validated and scalable healthcare solutions. She prioritizes collaborative and multidisciplinary networks, validating tools and methods through real-world evidence studies with the active engagement of healthcare professionals, patients, and citizens.

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