MEDrecord

Open platform

“Healthcare is bogged down in its current processes. And this is just as true for e-health. The financing model is holding back innovation. If you save on staff, for example, you get less funding because of payment per minute that staff actually spend on the patient, and not minutes that are saved. This is called ‘system failure’. While innovation can be much more effective there, especially with the current AI solutions. But here too, broad acceptance of AI is a problem. We can use AI to diagnose epilepsy patients, achieving 94 percent effectiveness. A neurologist can’t beat that, but often claims that he can. This leads to a very conservative type of care and holds back the impact that innovation could and should have. One of the main reasons we sit around the table with health insurers is to change the funding of healthcare. The only way to solve this financing problem is in large international projects where you can show the power of innovation. You demonstrate system failure by doing things differently, and integrally. That way, you also show what the savings are. Our role as MEDrecord is to act as integrator and standardisation expert. Always from a basic platform, a micro-service pluggable architecture. We apply the platform in all projects. Thus we ensure that the systems we build can connect to other systems around the world with our open APIs.”

Nutritional behaviour modelling

In the ITEA Food Friend project, which runs until 2023, MEDrecord is working alongside 16 partners from 5 countries with the goal of collaborating on defining a global generic framework and ontology for nutritional behaviour modelling. It aims to deliver a complete toolset that can automatically measure a person’s food intake by using a tube system (medical device) with a minimum of required user-input and turn it into personalised and actionable feedback. By measuring very precisely what people eat and what happens in their metabolism, you can determine exactly what the influence of nutrients is on health. For example, we discovered that it is not the patient who makes false claims about his food intake, but that nursing staff should be better informed about the use of food tubes. Instead of squeezing the food through the tube in fifteen minutes, the patient needs to absorb the food very slowly, in about three hours. Fun for your metabolism. This makes the human being the central focus in healthcare, in all kinds of ways. Ultimately, this targets the prevention of malnutrition in nursing homes and in patients using tube feeding and the nutritional trans-mural care of chronic diseases like obesity and type 2 diabetes. The Food Friend toolset consists of both hardware, in the form of sensors, and software, in the form of an application or webportal built on MEDrecord’s API and companion interface MedSafe. Together they automatically monitor a person’s food intake while barcode scanning automatically detects the nutritional content of food packages with a minimum of required user-input and provides relevant and timely feedback to the user, their coaches and food/meal providers.