Acronym: ESCORT
Title: AI Enabled Healthcare Services during Cross-Border Medical Emergencies and Regular Patient Services
Call: HORIZON-HLTH-2023-CARE-04
EU nr: 101137465
Period: 36 months 1/1/2024-31/12/2026
Total budget: €5,999,000.00; VUB budget: €609,375.00
Contact: Prof. Dr. Ives Hubloue
PI's webpage: https://researchportal.vub.be/en/persons/ives-hubloue
ABSTRACT
The goal of ESCORT project is to bring prominent advances in IoT, Wearables, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) to facilitate enhanced patient treatment services for the enrichment of patient experience and European health and care service resilience. The proposed innovations to be carried out in the project will assist in the development of ethics-by-design policy intervention based on the evidence collected and analysed from the pilot studies. panning across 36 months, the ESCORT project brings together the experiences of leading healthcare service providers from five (5) European countries and one (1) associated member state specialising in emergency medicine and offering regular health and care service providers across six (6) countries (AUTH, UCSC, VUB, KI, NH, MDA). The development of digital services will be designed in consultation with the stakeholders including patients, patient advocacy groups, health and care service professionals, health and care providers. The development of technology will be supported by research experts (UTH), complementing the expertise of SMEs (RINI, MKM, COSI, MDS). The overall integration of the proposed tools and services will be achieved by INTRA. The origins of ESCORT conceptualisation can be traced back to the supplier network creation within NO-FEAR (CSA) project in which validation of individual tools catering the demands of urgent and emergency medicine has been carried out. Building on the success of the NO-FEAR project, the workplan of ESCORT has been designed to enable integration of core technologies to develop digital services addressing patient needs and requirements. To achieve this project, the ESCORT consortium has identified three (3) scenarios which represents the pre-, and post- clinical patient care and the needs of victims requiring support for urgent and emergency medical care. All the scenarios will be validated across six (6) countries.
AIM (WHAT)
The ESCORT project will build on the outcomes of the previous NO-FEAR project to address the challenges of developing organisation policies and to align the activities of healthcare professionals in order to deliver high-quality patient services. The main ambition of ESCORT is to integrate innovative solutions and to identify/develop innovative digital services that can address the needs of patients. The project will also develop training methodology through emulated case-studies to educate healthcare professionals in the use of advanced medical solutions. Regular engagement with multiple stakeholder groups in co-design processes will allow the consortium to develop patient-centric services.
METHODOLOGY (HOW)
The ESCORT consortium will rely on their interdisciplinary clinical and research expertise to develop new methodologies and technological interventions for the improvement of pre-, post-clinical and emergency medical care services through digital technologies. The consortium will adopt an agile methodology consisting of five phases, namely: organisational readiness and co-design/co-production of patient services; sprint 1; sprint 2; sprint 3; and exploitation. Each sprint phase will, in turn, be characterised by research activities, development of tools, organisation of pilots, communication, dissemination, and stakeholder engagement. The overall project plan adopts a cyclic approach to engage with stakeholder communities and establish continuous evaluation methodology.
IMPACT (WHY)
ESCORT will make significant societal, scientific, and economic contributions. Concretely, the project will: improve patient services through integrated release of tools and solutions; raise awareness on emerging health threats; produce policy recommendations; and advance the field of AI applications. As such, ESCORT will contribute to public policy on population health, foster interdisciplinary innovations, and lead to the development of new digital patient services, with a return on investment.