PROFIT

Hospitals are facing acute staff shortages and the prevalence of chronic diseases will only continue to increase. Chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease affect one in three adults worldwide today. Globally, a shortage of 6 million nurses pre-COVID plus 4.7 million set to retire in the next few years has been exacerbated by an exodus from pandemic-related burnout. A smart hospital, as we envision it, connects people, data, and technology in intelligent ways for better end-to-end care experiences and seamless transitions across care settings. Smart hospitals rely on workflow automation to liberate healthcare staff from repetitive tasks that get in the way of providing patient care. Therefore, the first challenge that hospitals endure on their path towards being a Smart Hospital is to increase operational efficiency to free up time for patient care. PROFIT will introduce novel solutions to optimize and simplify the workflow in hospitals, with the main goal of streamlining the tasks of healthcare workers, improving patient outcomes, and reducing human error. These solutions will be based on technical innovations in (1) Smart asset management, (2) smart alarm response and context-aware information management, (3) data-driven operational efficiency and (4) clinical procedure assistance and automation. The PROFIT consortium will develop novel products and solutions that will simplify the tasks of healthcare professionals. The key targeted technical innovations are real-time tracking systems based on sensors and video data, a context-aware communication tool for nurses to handle alerts and tasks, and AI-based software for the automatic interpretation of clinical images. The project outputs will be integrated into the existing product offerings of project partners, which will allow them to exploit new products or expand towards new markets. The targeted outcome is a holistic solution which can be integrated with existing platforms from PROFIT industry partners for imaging, asset management and alarm response. New business models like activity-based costing services will be investigated. In addition to commercially exploitable project outputs, there will be integrated demonstrators and Proof of Concept (PoC) systems, which will be used for pre-clinical validation. The PROFIT consortium brings together multiple industrial partners to commercialize the project’s results and to benefit from the collaboration with knowledge institutes. The partners provide a balanced mix of research-oriented partners, technology suppliers and industrial system suppliers. Additionally, clinical experts in the project will ensure that end-user needs are sufficiently addressed leading towards new products, features, and services! Apart from the collaboration between two or more partners on specific technology topics, also output-oriented collaboration will be organized towards clinical use cases that exemplify the use of the solutions in clinical practice. The use cases include interventional radiology, stroke diagnosis and treatment, equipment sterilization, smart nursing alarms and cardiac care.