ITEA is the Eureka Cluster on software innovation
ITEA is the Eureka Cluster on software innovation

ITEA Impact story

PARTNER Smart Health

'One patient, one team' approach for hospitals

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Impact highlights

  • PARTNER demonstrates that a patient-centric approach with an optimised collaborative care team leads to greater efficiency – up to a 10% improvement compared to traditional workflows – and a knock-on effect of lower healthcare costs.
  • For patients, the PARNTER approach should result in better health outcomes and, above all, a higher quality of life even when ill.
  • The successful collaboration in PARTNER has resulted in clear commercial opportunities for the consortium; every contributor involved has released new products and services, ready to be installed in several hospitals for further trials.
  • Barco's Synergi represents a new business case and has allowed Barco to push further into the health domain. Synergi can lead to a significant improvement in the efficiency of the multi-disciplinary team meetings, as well as a significant reduction in the time between the referral of the patient and the commencement of treatment.
  • For iClinic in Canada, participation in the PARTNER project led to three additional full-time employees. In 2021, €200,000 of additional revenue was achieved and much more is expected in the future.
  • MEDrecord licensed its platform as a service, enabling four additional sales in 2022 based on the developments done within the PARTNER project. MEDrecord has also become a Microsoft partner in order to sell the MEDrecord APIs via the Azure marketplace.
  • The PARTNER experiments impacted the nature of SOPHEON's innovation management products: they are being launched to the global market and already have thousands of initial users.
  • Barco Healthcare had two startup initiatives, one of which was Synergi. In addition, ETRI also transferred the technology to DATAIZE, a Korean startup.


During a patient's journey through the health system, his or her medical information is often stored in multiple databases focusing on specific elements of the needed care and the patient's condition – even within one hospital. These databases generally cannot interact, which makes it impossible to draw up all information belonging to one patient at the click of a button.

Wearables and other compact devices that work with physiological sensors are creating a lot of possibilities to monitor patients when they are not in the hospital. Integrating this information with the hospital's data could open up an information treasure chest that can stimulate better treatment and lower costs for both patients and hospitals.

The PARTNER project, gathering 20 partners from Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands and South Korea, has developed an architecture that makes it possible to let different systems, offered by multiple vendors, communicate with each other. The solution also includes these self-monitoring solutions for patients.


Project results

Worldwide, over 40 million people suff er from heart failure. As a global challenge requires a global solution, one of PARTNER's primary achievements has been bringing together partners from three continents.

The system created by the PARTNER project partners has been demonstrated using a fic titious patient’s journey through cardiac care. The demonstration clearly showed the system's comprehensiveness: thanks to its architecture based on interoperability standards, it enabled the different partners' systems to exchange information.

Exploitation

In addition to providing a wider reach, the international collaboration has clear commercial opportunities for the consortium. The successful par ticipation of SME partners highlights PARTNER's role in circumventing dominance by larger companies and the resulting lock-in.

iClinic, for instance, developed the iClinic Heart Failure system during the PARTNER project and has successfully implemented the system at the Heart Failure Clinic at Vancouver General Hospital, with further deployment of the system at Kelowna General Hospital expected in Q4 2023.

MEDrecord succeeded in showcasing the (semantic) interoperability with several international partners and licensed its platform as a service, enabling four additional sales in 2022 based on the developments done within the PARTNER project.

Sopheon has brought the MS Teams integration designed in the PARTNER project to the market under the name Microsoft Connect. This application was launched as part of its Accolade 13 release and has already been sold and implemented many times at new and existing customers as a feature component of the standard offering. In addition, Sopheon has launched a series of new ‘InnovationOps’ products in 2022.

Next to these SME successes, the project has opened doors for large players too.

Barco's Synergi - a solution for more efficient meetings between multi-disciplinary healthcare professionals - has been used in a pilot in two hospitals in the UK and Australia, which represents a new business case and has allowed Barco to push further into the health domain. As a result of PARTNER, some Synergi components are now being used in existing products and Barco is currently working on new, innovative collaborative features for their radiology displays based on the work performed in the project.

Finally, thanks to the PARTNER Hub prototype developed by Korean partner ETRI, patients have ownership of and access to their medical data that is scattered across several hospitals. In addition, ETRI and the Korean consortium demonstrated collaboration between doctors through a medical workflow for a chronic disease patient. In addition, ETRI has developed a separate governance management system to be used for automating a wide variety of medical data processing by linking it with the PARTNER Hub.

PARTNER's maxim is ‘one patient, one team’; its central philosophy is driven by dedicated, personalised patient care. This should result in better health outcomes and, above all, a higher quality of life even when ill.

Date updated: 04-12-2023

More information

Download PARTNER Impact story

Related projects

PARTNER

Organisations

Barco N.V. (Belgium)
ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research…
MEDrecord BV (The Netherlands)
Sopheon N.V. (The Netherlands)
iClinic Systems Inc. (Canada)