Well-being and Healthcare

Major Challenges and Research Activities

One of the major challenges we have to cope with is to deliver healthcare to citizens at high quality and affordable costs. In particular, this challenge has to be considered in the light of prevalent trends in healthcare such as prolonged medical care for the ageing population, increasing expenses for managing chronic diseases, and the demand for personal health systems. This emerging situation necessitates a change in the way healthcare is delivered to patients and healthcare processes are managed. ICT will be key to implement these changes and to enable advanced healthcare services. ICT can further contribute to improve illness prevention, to facilitate active participation of patients, and to enable personalization of care.

ziekenhuis The challenge is to facilitate a new paradigm of personalized healthcare within the context of an ageing population. Common medical record systems will enable people to receive medical treatment anywhere without having to contact their local doctor or hospital. Citizens will be enabled and supported to live more healthy lives, minimizing time in hospital, at local doctors or in care homes. Home monitoring will become more widely available for people considered at risk. This requires better monitoring regimes for chronically ill patients, through monitoring of vital signs. As a result, the increasingly elderly population will be able to live more independently in their home environment, overcoming isolation and minimizing their reliance on carers. For health and social care providers, services will be focused around more personalized and preventative health management, rather than treatment, while containing the overall cost of delivery.

In order to meet these goals, highly interdisciplinary research is needed which does not only address technical issues, but deals with organizational, legal and regulatory, ethical and societal aspects as well. In particular the following challenges have to be addressed:

·	to provide personalized care solutions which enable the participation of patients in healthcare processes and which also respond to the needs of elderly people;

·	to provide cost-effective ways to deliver healthcare to patients, and to manage related information and processes;

·	to increase patient safety by optimizing medical interventions and preventing errors.

Some scientific and technology ICT challenges are:

-	Data communication, including wireless systems that integrate with sensor networks meeting both the medical standards and the clinical requirements;

-	Embedded systems as the basis for smart medical implants, home monitoring systems, and other health-related applications;

-	Development of a wide range of micro- and nano components (sensors, interconnects, power sources), bio-materials and data communication systems;

-	Development of advanced simulation, visualization and modeling, including Grids, to provide new solutions for medical applications;

-	Networking solutions to access, search and manipulate huge distributed datasets, including the integration of clinical, biomedical and genomic information;

Incorporation of organizational perspectives (health management, social care management, etc) and developments in biomedical engineering (e.g. lifelong implantable systems as replacements for non-functioning nerves and muscles and automatic drug delivery systems for the elderly and those with drug-dependent care regimes) into the development of new ICT technologies, services and applications.

CTIT research activities address many of the above mentioned challenges, and aim at personalized healthcare solutions, optimized healthcare processes, and advanced service architectures for healthcare:

Personalized healthcare solutions:

personalised Our goal is to develop technologies and infrastructures for realizing personalized care solutions. We aim at innovative services, which enable health status monitoring for chronically ill patients as well as for persons at risk. The integration of these services in healthcare processes and the interoperability with information systems are also addressed. Provided solutions will be based on ambient intelligence techniques, sensor networks, and wearable/mobile ICT systems. They will empower patients to participate in healthcare processes, and facilitate remote monitoring and care at preferred environments (e.g., homes). Altogether these activities will contribute to better health, well-being and mobility.

Optimization and ICT support for healthcare processes:

hospital planning Patient treatment requires the cooperation of various healthcare providers and medical disciplines. Thus optimal process support plays a crucial role in order to reduce treatment costs and patient discomfort. This necessitates a close alignment between the healthcare process, healthcare organizations and information about the patient. Research activities include the provision of models and tools for process optimization, and efficiency of resource planning and utilization. Another focus is on ICT support of treatment processes in both healthcare organizations and healthcare networks. Relevant topics include the modeling and automation of healthcare processes, the flexible implementation of medical guidelines and pathways, the realization of lifetime patient records, the provision of patient information and medical knowledge at the point of care, the evolution of healthcare information systems, and privacy and security issues.

Service architectures and health:

Our goal is to develop advanced service-oriented architectures for care. Such architectures could provide efficient solutions to many of the problems we encounter in the health domain: interoperability (i.e., sharing health information and connecting health with non-health applications), access (i.e., technology-transparent use of health services and access to healthcare information), and agility (situation-driven composition of health services).

SROs involved:

- ASSIST (service architectures)

- WiSe (smart medical surroundings)

- NICE (human machine interfaces and bio-informatics)

- ISTRICE (security & privacy aspects)

- IE&ICT (logistics and healthcare processes)