Project: Medical White Board - an interactive software solution for planning and follow-up of patient treatments in hospitals
In developed countries, population ageing along with the skewed demographic development, result in a rapid increase of hospital patients: This combined with the public’s rising expectations of quality treatment and public desire to reduce the health expenditure, all add to the strain on the health system resources. _x000D__x000D_Efficient ICT planning and scheduling systems currently used in industry for decision support has not yet penetrated the healthcare sector. Planning processes in health care are very complex, often highly coupled across and along, organizational levels (operational, tactical and strategic) and clinical pathways, while sharing limited resources. Today the planning and scheduling is handled to a large degree manually—this leads to inefficient resource utilization and unnecessary admin work for the medical practitioners._x000D_Software for efficient planning and scheduling in health must handle clinical pathways and the interrelation and dependencies between resources. Furthermore, it must be coupled with an intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI)._x000D__x000D_The state of the art of GUI has made great leaps over last five years (touch screen, gesture identification, graphical presentations, etc.). At the same time, modern heuristics and hybrid algorithms have allowed for larger and more complex scheduling problems to be solved. Finally, the hospitals have adopted clinical pathways, which is a natural view of the interrelationship of resources. Hence, the time is ripe to use GUI with ‘clinically led’ methodology based on the proven ‘experience-led’ design processes as a door opener for quantitative decision support that use optimization algorithms to plan and schedule resources efficiently along and in-between clinical pathways. This consortium brings together the combined capabilities needed to deliver this breakthrough. _x000D_The goal of the project is to develop an electronic Medical White Board, a hospital resource (personnel, equipment, rooms, etc.) planning software, with a world class intuitive graphical user interface, hyper fast algorithms and a ‘clinician led’ innovation model. Its expected range of planning activities covers admission planning, long term and short term treatment planning, planning within teams and across hospital facilities, as well as follow up care planning. The Medical White Board will have access to information provided by other hospital systems through a custom interface layer which can be made compatible with existing hospital IT systems. _x000D__x000D_Medical White Board features include: everywhere connectivity (online), easy-to-use interface, dynamic response, what-if analysis, suggestions to optimized resource use, and an overview of patients and resources. For example, if a new situation occurs and changes to a patient’s plans are required, the doctors can consult between themselves and, in real time, in the meeting, investigate what-if scenarios by moving assets around ‘places’ and ‘time-slots’ in the care facility simply by using "drag and drop" movements with their fingers on the touch screen. It will allow them to receive optimised suggestions, and to analyse possible decisions and their effects directly on screen during meetings._x000D_Medical White Board will initially target medium and large hospitals in UK, Ireland, and Scandinavia, which represent market share value of 30 million euro. Our goal is to take a significant part of this market share. _x000D__x000D_Hospital Organiser will lead the project as well as deliver the CO module and background software. iSOFT has sign a LOI to be the primary distribution channel for the Medical White Board for UK& Ireland and the Nordic countries. _x000D_The internationally recognized research institute, SINTEF, have a world class expertise in the state-of-the-art meta-heuristic search algorithms needed to provide fast solutions to scheduling problems that are robust across hospital-to-hospital variations._x000D__x000D_TheAlloy, a leading global brand in product and interaction design with a strong track record in complex, highly specialised high stakes, professional processes like live broadcast TV and fire-fighting. TheAlloy’s skills will be complemented by the specialist Medical Informatics Expertise of Vivit AS a specialist Norwegian spin–off company from the University in Trondheim with experienced researchers all on PhD level. From start to end of the project, Vivit AS will work with TheAlloy to interview and observe users in their actual context and conduct workshops to understand their current workflows as well as the thought-processes, mind states and pressures that form the context of the care pathway planning process. _x000D__x000D_This team and approach will ensure the solution delivers a simple experience that fully considers the specifics of different clinical pathways and is flexible enough to adapt quickly to a fast moving clinical environments in which resource scheduling needs can change, literally, in a heartbeat.
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Acronym
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MWB
(Reference Number: 6182)
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Duration
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01/05/2011 - 31/12/2013
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Project Topic
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IT solution offering hospitals breakthrough benefits to productivity, use of resources, and patient experiences. It'll help doctors and nurses take decisions faster, by giving the most intuitive user interface and the fastest responses to ‘what if’ planning queries of any product in the market.
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Network
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Eurostars
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Call
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Eurostars Cut-Off 5
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Project partner
