Within only six months, over 7.4 million people have been diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2. In the most severely hit countries, more than 10% of infected patients have received treatment in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Insufficient data and limited knowledge on the disease as well as the lack of tools to support the intensivist in making accurate, timely and informed decisions has led to high mortality rates. Continuous surveillance, the collection and intelligent analysis of data from many sources, including ventilators and electrical impedance tomography, would allow intensivists to decide on the best suitable treatment to accelerate the recovery of the often comorbid COVID-19 patients, while reducing the burden on clinical staff and healthcare costs. This information would also increase our understanding of the yet unknown course of disease, supporting other stakeholders in the quest for new therapies. In ENVISION, our multidsciplinary public-private consortium will advance an innovative digital tool, Sandman.MD, a real-time and plug-and-play monitoring app, to an intelligent decision-support system for monitoring, prediction and treatment of COVID-19 patients in ICUs – the Sandman.ICU – reaching Technology Readiness Level 9 and ready for CE marking by the end of the project. The app has been developed by our SME partner app@work and successfully introduced by several hospitals in Germany for use during the perioperative period. Sandman.ICU will be integrated into an AI-driven data analytics suite with predictive modelling tools and enhanced with a smart alert functionality. The digital tool will be validated and demonstrated in 14 hospitals across Europe. Our Health Technology Assessment expert partner will demonstrate the economic and societal value of Sandman.ICU, while an experienced SME will manage the innovation process in view of an immediate market uptake. The rollout will be supported by the European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care.

In the face of climate change, events like COVID-19 crisis with high impact in specific sectors demonstrated the importance of resilient societies. As such, it is vital to act with a level of urgency for climate change related impacts to health sector that are proportionate to the scale of the threat, be prepared and informed on the basis of the best-available science, and practise clear and consistent communications to all those involved. Therefore, in MOUNTADAPT, various regional and local authorities and community members will take the leadership to co-design, co-develop and test eleven state of the art climate adaptation solutions across the mountains biogeographical region, in Austria, Slovenia, France and Romania. A diversity of actors of the health system will also collaborate throughout the project to demonstrate the replicability of the solutions in a diversity of settings: within the Alpine mountains in Romania, outside Europe in the Pyrenees in Andora and beyond, in the continental area in Germany. MOUNTADAPT will develop robust models to better understand the impact of climate change on health (PR1). The project will cover the whole chain of response to a climate induced health emergency with monitoring tools (PR2) that will be directly linked to short term forecasts to communicate warnings (PR3) to the relevant stakeholders. An emergency management tool (PR4) will finally support health systems to optimally organise staff in crisis time. This will be supported by guidance for transforming the health system (PR5) and empowered actors with the training courses for healthcare professionals and awareness raising campaigns for citizens (PR6). Detailed monitoring protocols and impact assessment frameworks (PR7) will allow for a continuous evaluation of a range of adaptation solutions during and after the project, providing incentive for their implementation. Finally, MOUNTADAPT will provide a full guide (PR8) for the implementation of its adaptation solutions, boosting their replication in new territories and will provide feedback to the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority.