Good practice:

Regional ICT testbeds for personalised care and clinical descisions

The county (region) of Jämtland Härjedalen is sparsely but evenly populated, with a population that is on average 10 years older than the national average. The county itself covers a land area of 49 500 m2 (almost equal to Belgium and the Netherlands). These circumstances provide a great challenge to the healthcare providers in the region, with a large proportion of elderly that are living far away from the nearest hospital. In addition, with a large share of senior citizens, the tax incomes for the healthcare system is among the lowest in the entire country, meaning that in order to find innovative R&D solutions, Region Jämtland Härjedalen through its R&D ProjectCentre turned its attention to a rather unusual funding source – the European Commission’s Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020. By providing a true societal need and offering an entire region as a testbed in collaboration with regional developmental partners, the county was successful in teaming up with universities, research institutes and ICT solution businesses and managed to secure R&D funding through the project C3-Cloud (https://c3-cloud.eu/), as well as six others. The main beneficiaries of the practice are the patients and their relatives, but also nurses, physicians and other healthcare providers who will be receiving the results of this good practice. Among the stakeholders we find the ICT-developing companies, different research organisations and universities.

Initially, there was only a handful of driven persons with the ambitious idea of identifying funding to develop the region’s healthcare system. Once the project was secured, all of the team (which now doubled) was financed through the project funding. Today 8 people coordinate the activities

The Good Practice has provided the region and its healthcare system with R&D financing, a development that would never have taken place had it not been for the Good Practice. The Good Practice provides a model that could be tested in several other European regions that are facing these common healthcare challenges. In addition, the “know-how” as well as several KPIs are well documented throughout the project.

The Practice has encountered several challenges such as:
1) Implementation of the results from the tests.
2) The long-term management of algorithms and knowledge.
3) The partners are more interested in providing their solution to the market, rather than building complete caresystems

This Good Practice can be transferred to other European regions that experience similar challenges with an increasing number of elderlies that have multiple diseases that would require a personalised healthcare plan as well as decision support for treating healthcare personnel. In addition, the ProjectCentre of Region Jämtland Härjedalen has been granted ERDF-funding for a period of three years to facilitate knowledge transfer on how to successfully prepare an application for Horizon framework funding.