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

Helsinki, 15 September 2022

IMPACT has made healthcare more efficient, accurate and cost-effective

Healthcare faces many challenges, including improving patient outcome and working more cost-effectively, while the demand is growing, staff capacity is declining, and new clinical and technological developments succeed each other quickly. The international collaborative ITEA project IMPACT has addressed several challenges by leveraging the power of data and building on the preceding award-winning ITEA projects MEDIATE and BENEFIT to move towards intelligence-based healthcare. Thanks to this innovative approach, IMPACT has won the 2022 ITEA Award of Excellence in the category ‘Innovation’ and was one of the three finalists for the 2022 Eureka Award ‘Best Product and Service Innovation’.

IMPACT improves the treatment of liver & brain cancer and cardiac diseases

The ITEA project IMPACT, led by Philips and gathering 14 partners from Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden, has automated labour-intensive data processing steps for clinical use-cases on cardiac treatment, liver oncology and brain oncology. Focusing on personalised diagnosis & treatment planning, minimally invasive & robotic-assisted surgery and workflow optimisation & data intelligence, IMPACT has made healthcare more efficient, accurate and cost-effective, which is highly beneficial for both patients and physicians.

In terms of accuracy, for example, the outlining of tumour tissue during surgical planning has been improved, allowing the margin for tumour excision to be reduced by 20% so that less healthy tissue is removed. The tumour and liver segmentation software is now being used in a prospective clinical trial to determine the amount of tissue which should be ablated to prevent reoccurrence of the tumour. Data analysis for clinical business intelligence has been accelerated, reducing the time needed for data analysis to less than five minutes, which is a tremendous improvement compared to the days or weeks it previously took to retrieve and manually combine data.

Challenges (and solutions) ahead

While the project has resulted in many innovations and exploitable results, there are still many challenges that need further investigation, like system automation, 3D visualisation and synthetic data generation for the development of AI-based applications. Several IMPACT partners will continue to build on their innovations in the recently started ITEA project ASSIST and the Eureka Clusters project IWISH.

This way, IMPACT will continue to impact society and further enhance patient experience, improve population health, reduce costs and improve the work life of healthcare providers. These are widely accepted as the best methods to optimise health system performance and to meet their ultimate goal of improving quality of life for both givers and receivers of healthcare.

This project has received funding from:

Note for editors, not for publication

* The acronym IMPACT stands for Intelligence based iMprovement of Personalized treatment And Clinical workflow support.

For interview requests, questions and additional information about OPTIMUM and ITEA, please contact:

IMPACT Contact person
Robert Hofsink (Philips)
robert.hofsink@philips.com

ITEA Contact person
Linda van den Borne-Toupet
linda.van.den.borne@itea4.org

IMPACT project partners
https://itea4.org/project/impact.html

About ITEA
ITEA is the Eureka Cluster for software innovation, enabling a large international community to collaborate in funded projects that turn innovative ideas into new businesses, jobs, economic growth and benefits for society. https://itea4.org