ACTIVITIES :: ICT for Health :: Research :: Projects :: Risk assessment and patient safety
Risk assessment and patient safety
Maintaining a healthy population requires health authorities to manage a range of individual and collective risks. Using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provides more flexible and powerful means to monitor, evaluate and manage patients' health risks. The EU is supporting research in this field under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).
Risk is an inherent part of health care. For example patients can react badly to specific drugs or drug associations; surgical interventions may lead to complications while delaying them might be even more dangerous and simply admitting patients to hospital exposes them to highly-resistant pathogens, while their medical conditions make them especially vulnerable. Diagnostic, prescription and dispensing errors may all harm patients' health.
ICT has considerable potential to improve risk assessment in healthcare. It enables the gathering and processing of large amounts of data helping policy-makers allocate resources according to healthcare needs. At the level of individual patients, ICT can be used to guide treatment decisions minimise the possibility of adverse side effects and complications. See contribution of ICT to Patient Safety
In FP7, the Commission aims to supports projects which seek to develop advanced ICT applications to improve risk assessment and patient safety.
In 2008, the Commission allocated €30 million for projects focusing on developing systems which can monitor and analyse adverse events, for example unwanted drug effects. Moreover, collaboration between the EU and Latin American healthcare researchers to boost patient safety standards in the area of electronic health records are also supported.
In 2009, the Commission is allocating an additional €28 million to co-fund projects focusing on:
- improving safety of surgical interventions, assisting surgeons in the planning phase and during the intervention to reduce adverse events and optimise treatment;
- improving the interaction between clinical care and clinical research and facilitating the process of selecting patients for clinical trials; and
- tools to improve early detection of public health events (such as outbreaks of viral hemorrhagic fevers) and thus contributing to the improvement of global health security.
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Projects
- Avert-It "Advanced Arterial Hypotension Adverse Event prediction through a Novel Bayesian Neural Network" - (factsheet)
- Comoestas "Electronic Interactive Patient Record" (factsheet)
- DebugIt "Detecting and Eliminating Bacteria UsinG Information Technology" (factsheet)
- DECIPHER - Distributed European Community Individual Patient Healthcare Electronic Record
- eHealthMonitor - Intelligent Knowledge Platform for Personal Health Monitoring Services
- EMPOWER - Support of Patient Empowerment by an intelligent self-management pathway for patients
- Epilepsiae "Evolving Platform for Improving Living Expectation of Patients Suffering from IctAl Events" (factsheet)
- EU-ADR (former Alert) "Early detection of adverse drug events by integrative mining of clinical records and biomedical knowledge" (factsheet)
- EURECA - Enabling information re-Use by linking clinical REsearch and CAre
- Gap "Guard, Anticipation and Prediction. A new approach to Health Risk Prediction" (factsheet)
- Linked2Safety - A next generation, secured linked data medical information space for semantically-interconnecting electronic health records and clinical trials systems advancing patients safety in clinical research
- Mednet "Latin American Health Care Network" (factsheet)
- MobiGuide - Guiding Patients Anytime Everywhere
- PSIP "Patient safety through intelligent procedures in medication" (factsheet)
- Remine "High Performances Prediction, Detection and Monitoring Platform for Patient Safety Risk Management" (factsheet)
- HITCH - Healthcare Interoperability Testing and Conformance Harmonization
- M-Eco - The Medical Ecosystem - Personalized Event-based Surveillance (factsheet)
- MXL - Enhanced patient safety by computational Modelling from clinically available X-rays to minimise the risk of overload and instability for optimised function and joint Longevity (factsheet)
- PONTE - Efficient Patient Recruitment for Innovative Clinical Trials of Existing Drugs to other Indications (factsheet)
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RT3S - Real Time Simulation for Safer vascular Stenting
SALUS - Scalable, Standard based Interoperability Framework for Sustainable Pro-active Post Market Safety Studies - SAFROS - Patient Safety in Robotic Surgery
- SCATh - Smart Catheterization
- SemanticHealthNet - Semantic Interoperability for Health Network
- TLEMsafe - Improving safety and predictability of complex musculo-skeletal surgery using a patient-specific navigation system
- TRANSFoRm - TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH AND PATIENT SAFETY IN EUROPE
- TRANSFoRm-EnlargedEU - Translational Research and Patient Safety in Europe - EnlargedEU
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| Last update by the Editor (ehealth(AT)cec.eu.int): 01/02/12 |