The European Commission recently funded AICCELERATE, a multiparty project aiming to develop AI solutions to improve patient care and hospital processes. The goal of the “AI ACCELERATOR – a Smart Hospital Care Pathway Engine” project is to demonstrate the scalability of the AI solutions for different types of healthcare use cases. The project consortium led by Helsinki University Hospital (HUS) consists of 16 partners from eight European countries.
The AICCELERATE project introduces an approach for scaling up AI-enabled digital solutions for different hospital use cases. AICCELERATE will further develop partners’ existing digital solutions to enable the development of a Smart Hospital Care Pathway (SHCP) Engine. This engine serves as a toolset for AI models and robotics to improve the quality of care and health outcomes and enables lean management and effective decision-making.
Spinverse supported in the building of the consortium and helped it to prepare the winning project proposal in the highly competitive Horizon 2020 call, where only four proposals out of a total 80 submitted were granted funding. “The proposal preparation would have been difficult without Spinverse's support. Their expertise in EU project building and in setting up an international consortium was instrumental in our success,” says Suzan Ikävalko, Research and Innovation Manager from HUS.
Three pilots with five partner hospitals
The project will start in early 2021 and the technology to be developed in the AICCELERATE project will be tested in three pilots, which will gather feedback and learning experience for the development of scalable artificial intelligence. Three different pilot cases will be carried out in five different partner hospitals. HUS brought together a consortium of five European university hospitals, one university and ten technology companies to apply for European Union Horizon2020 funding for their project.
In a pilot led by HUS, the digital treatment pathway for Parkinson's disease developed for the Health Village Platform (Terveyskylä) combines remote monitoring of patient well-being and symptoms, analytics and robotics assisting in drug dosage. In the future, the goal is to utilize the platform, artificial intelligence engine and device integrations created in the pilot to build intelligent services that improve the treatment and monitoring of other chronic diseases as well.
The pilot led by Oulu University Hospital aims to improve the planning of emergency and elective surgeries. In the future, the goal is for the operating rooms to be optimal from the perspective of both the patient and the staff resources.
The aim of the third pilot is to improve the care pathway of chronically ill pediatric patients so that appointments and service contacts with various experts, as well as post-procedure repatriation, would take place in the best possible time.
“The cornerstones of the AICCELERATE project are patient involvement and evidence-based trust in artificial intelligence. We are looking for an intelligent application that a clinician can rely on to help with their own work, as well as AI-based treatment solutions that the patient can rely on,” Ikävalko concludes.
The partners in the consortium are the five pilot hospitals Helsinki University Hospital from Finland, Oulu University Hospital from Finland, Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù from Italy, Barcelona Children's Hospital from Spain, University hospital Università degli Studi di Padova from Italy. Other partners are Erasmus Univ. Rotterdam from Netherlands, a RTO Fundació Eurecat from Spain, 7 SMEs aiming to advance the digitalization of the European healthcare services, Chino from Italy, Symptoma from Austria, Nuromedia from Germany, SRDC from Turkey, Evondos from Finland, TICBioMed from Spain, and NeuroPath from Belgium, and 2 large enterprises, NEC Laboratories Europe from Germany and Innofactor from Finland.
More information: HUS press release