During cross-border health emergencies, health and care services may be overwhelmed by high numbers of patients requiring unplanned care. Delays and backlogs in regular care, as a result of the stretched healthcare system, leave millions of patients with regular care needs unattended, resulting in disastrous healthcare outcomes. If poor healthcare outcomes across the population are to be avoided, healthcare systems must become more resilient and flexible and allow for rapid changes in the care delivery services. RAPIDE aims to develop, validate, and demonstrate a portfolio of powerful tools that enable healthcare systems to increase the robustness of decisions, the resilience of healthcare professionals and patients, and the flexibility in the modalities of care delivery, thereby maintaining access to regular care during health emergencies.
RAPIDE emphasizes opportunities for optimizing in-hospital care but also for relocating care from hospitals to community and home environments without loss of care quality. Thus, the project focuses on two closely linked challenges – 1: Identifying and predicting how much care and which care needs to be moved along the care chain; 2: Identifying and verifying effective, feasible, and acceptable ways to make this reconfiguration of care a reality. This will be achieved by (a) resource modeling, which builds comprehensive foresight and forecasting solutions and links them to patient flow optimization along the whole care chain, and (b) selecting and implementing the best available tools to deliver regular care in new ways. RAPIDE will be co-designed and co-validated with stakeholders, from patients, GPs, clinicians, and hospital managers to health ministries, pandemic management, and public health agencies, to ensure usability, acceptability, and equitable real-world value.
Find more information on Linked-In and the project's website.