Lea Lösch is a PhD candidate at the Athena Institute at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, concerned with the production, integration and marginalization of different types of knowledge in evidence-based medicine. She is intrigued by questions such as: What constitutes valid medical knowledge in various situations and periods? How do different types of knowledge come to be valued or disregarded? And what are the implications of this for the health decisions we make and how healthcare is delivered?
Her research is informed by her disciplinary background in medical sociology and social studies of science and technology, along with her expertise in mixed methods, computational methods, and inter- and transdisciplinary research approaches.
In her PhD research, Lea investigates how digital methods may provide an innovative way to diversify the knowledge and perspectives available in evidence-based medicine. Specifically, her project leverages natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyse and incorporate patients’ experience-based knowledge from online sources into public health and clinical guidelines. She strongly believes that the meaningful inclusion of more diverse knowledge has the potential to improve healthcare practice and, in this case, lead to more equitable, relevant and robust guidelines as recommendations better reflect the needs and experiences of patients and professionals.
