Sabine Koch

Sabine Koch

Professor | Head of department
Telephone: +46852487149
Mobile phone: +46736297586
Visiting address: Widerströmska huset, Tomtebodavägen 18A, 17165 Solna
Postal address: C7 Lärande, Informatik, Management och Etik, C7 Informatik Koch, 171 77 Stockholm
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About me

  • Currently (July 2024 - June 2029) I am the Head of the Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME) which I combine with my research and education in health informatics. 

    I came to Karolinska Institutet in 2008, when I was recruited as Strategic Professor of Health Informatics and Director of HIC, the Health Informatics Centre at LIME.  From 2012 - 2016, I was the Programme Director for our Global Master's Programme in Health Informatics, a joint programme with the Department of Computer and Systems Science at Stockholm University. From 2016 - 2019 I acted as the Departmental Director of undergraduate and master's education at the Department LIME. I further had been the Deputy Head of Department for LIME between 2014 and 2022.

    I hold both a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. degree in Medical Informatics from Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg, Germany. I got into the field of medical informatics in 1988 which I five years later combined with research in human-computer interaction and I enjoy working in this inspiring cross-disciplinary field since then.

    To drive our field forward, I am engaged in a number of activities both locally in Sweden and around the world, currently acting as:

    - Past President of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA)
    - Editor-in-Chief of Methods of Information in Medicine
    - Associate Editor of Applied Clinical Informatics
    - Member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Medical Informatics
    - Member, National eHealth Council
    - Member of the External Advisory Board of the Medical Informatics Initiative Germany by the German Ministry of Education and Research
    - Member of the European Advisory Community for Philips Healthcare
    - Member of the Advisory Group "Terminology and eHealth" for Equalis

    Education
    - PhD 1998 (summa cum laude) – Medical Informatics, Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg, Germany, “Methoden zur diagnoseorientierten Qualitätsobjektivierung und automatischen Bildverbesserung in der zahnärztlichen Radiologie“, Main supervisor: Prof. Dr. C.O. Köhler
    - MSc 1993 – Medical Informatics, University of Applied Sciences, Heilbronn and Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg, Germany

    Academic honours, awards and prizes
    2017 Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics
    2016 Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics
    2007 - 2008 Mentorsprogram Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences
    2000 - 2001 Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, post-doctoral scholarship
    1995 Swedish Institute, scholarship

Research

  • My early research was in dental informatics, especially dental imaging and IT supported integrated care concepts for dental offices. I explored these concepts further and applied them for collaborative work using mobile tools for homecare of the aging population.

    I have a broad interest in health informatics including models for collaborative care, human factors/usability, evaluation of information systems, consumer informatics as well as evidence-based decision support and information visualization for enhanced decision making. I strive for combining structure with flexibility and technology design with healthcare and consumer needs aiming to build the theoretical basis needed to fully understand the socio-technical environment in order to be able to enhance health service delivery.

Teaching

  • 2016 - 2019 Departmental Director of Education, Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and ECthics (LIME).

    2012 - 2016 Programme director, Master's programme in Health Informatics

Articles

All other publications

Grants

  • Swedish Research Council for Health Working Life and Welfare
    1 January 2025 - 31 December 2027
    Research problem and specific questions: The acute staffing crisis in healthcare calls for the need to redesign care delivery models to meet the needs of patients in efficient ways. Remote patient monitoring (RPM) has been proposed as a new model of care to achieve this. Yet, RPM often fails to be implemented due to difficulties in integrating new or changed tasks into the daily work of an already strained workforce. Task shifting has been recommended as a strategy to make best use of available resources, but the shifting of tasks from healthcare staff to patients, caregivers, and digital health technologies remains largely unexplored. Our specific research questions are:How do healthcare professionals, patients, and informal caregivers experience their work tasks related to RPM?How can task shifting and sharing be made explicit in the context of RPM?How does the shifting and sharing of tasks in the context of RPM influence patient, caregiver, and staff experiences?How does the shifting and sharing of tasks in the context of RPM influence healthcare costs?Data and method: The study context will involve four hospitals in the Stockholm Region that are developing RPM services for various care processes. We will engage with the hospitals using an action research approach involving three phases. In phase 1, we will explore experiences of work tasks related to RPM
    in phase 2, we will engage relevant actors in co-designing task shifting strategies
    in phase 3, we will evaluate experiences and costs of task shifting. Data will be collected qualitatively (observations, interviews, focus group discussions, co-design workshops, documents) and quantitatively (questionnaires, care utilization, costs).Societal relevance and utilization: This project addresses the societal challenge of ensuring high-quality healthcare in the face of workforce shortages and increasing patient demands. By exploring how task shifting can be supported in the context of RPM, we aim to provide evidence-based solutions that can improve resource utilization in healthcare, and the experiences of healthcare professionals, patients, and informal caregivers.Plan for project realization: Access to the study setting has been established. Data collection and analysis will be carried out longitudinally by experienced researchers with interdisciplinary expertise, as well as co-researchers from the study context. The costs cover mainly personnel, analysis, and dissemination activities.
  • European Commission
    1 January 2023 - 31 December 2025
  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2022 - 31 December 2025
    Machine learning is already widely used for a variety of tasks. Initial approaches were strictly centralized, but have recently evolved into the so-called federated learning, primarily to address privacy concerns. In this model, multiple clients can collaboratively train a model under the guidance of a centralized server. The clear advantage here is that the data remains with the clients, and they can still influence the global model in their individual training sessions. One of the first deployed systems is at Google, for character recognition on smart phones, but is too slow when operating at massive scale. We have identified a specific societal instance (fatal Tesla Model X crash) in which fast, distributed and federated learning could have prevented a loss of life. Moreover, 21st-century pandemics present dramatic societal problems and require new scalable federated learning techniques. This project aims to develop a highly scalable, flexible, extensible, distributed federated machine learning (Scalable Federated Learning, for short) approach that can directly benefit public health and wellness. Special attention will be paid to the so-called outliers (high-entropy samples). We have two main objectives, and our work is structured around them: 1) Creation of a feasible and flexible scalable model for the life sciences and 2) Development of the scalable, flexible, federated machine learning framework.
  • European Commission
    1 November 2020 - 31 January 2024
  • European Commission
    1 November 2020 - 31 October 2022
  • European Commission
    1 December 2018 - 31 March 2022
  • Swedish Research Council for Health Working Life and Welfare
    1 January 2017 - 31 December 2019
  • Swedish Research Council for Health Working Life and Welfare
    1 September 2016 - 31 August 2019
  • VINNOVA
    10 May 2016 - 31 July 2019
  • VINNOVA
    1 January 2014 - 11 January 2016
  • VINNOVA
    21 November 2011 - 31 October 2013
  • VINNOVA
    1 September 2008 - 1 September 2010

Employments

  • Professor, Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics, Karolinska Institutet, 2008-

Degrees and Education

  • Docent, Uppsala universitet, 2005

Leadership and responsibility assignments

  • Head of department, Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics, Karolinska Institutet, 2024-2029

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