‘One patient, one team’: ITEA Award of Excellence for collaborative project ‘PARTNER’

Award alert! An international project Barco is leading has received the ITEA Award of Excellence. The project spans three continents and is a technological effort to tackle lack of transparency that is caused by fragmented storing of patient information in different systems and databases.

The project we’re leading is called PARTNER and was instigated by the Eureka cluster ITEA, which brings together a large international community to collaborate in funded projects. As a result, we’re working on this project with 20 partners from Belgium, Canada, Korea and the Netherlands. Our joint efforts are now rewarded by the cluster’s Award of Excellence.

Improving the patient journey

During a patient’s journey through the health system, their medical information is often stored in multiple databases that focus on specific things – even within one hospital. These databases generally cannot interact with each other, which makes it impossible to draw up all information belonging to one patient at the click of a button.

Smart wearables

Wearables and other compact devices that work with physiological sensors are also opening up a lot of possibilities to monitor patients when they’re not in the hospital. Integrating this information with the hospital’s data could open up an information treasure that can stimulate better treatment and lower costs for both patient and hospital. The PARTNER project has developed an architecture that makes it possible to let different systems, offered by multiple vendors, communicate with each other. The solution includes these self-monitoring solutions for patients.

Ready for next steps

The system has been demonstrated using a fictitious patient’s journey through cardiac care. The demo clearly showed the system’s comprehensiveness: thanks to its architecture based on interoperability standards, it enabled the different partners’ systems to communicate with each other. Every contributor involved has released new products and services, ready to be installed in several hospitals for further trials.

'One patient, one team’

PARTNER’s maxim is ‘One patient, one team’: its central philosophy is driven by dedicated, personalized patient care. When combined with the greater degree of freedom and comfort enabled by smart wearables, this should result in better health outcomes and, above all, a higher quality of life even when ill.