Companies developing healthcare IT solutions (e.g. Electronic or Personal Health Record Systems, mHealth, eHealth, Connected Devices, IoT) deal with health sensitive data and need to ensure compliance with strict data protection regulations and cyber security standards. Implementing security and compliance requirements represents a costly, time consuming and risky activity for health application developers. Chino.io Platform offers secure API for storing and managing sensitive health data, ensuring compliance with EU, member states and US regulations, and offering medical grade quality and security guarantees (we are ISO 9001 & ISO 27001 certified, as mandated by Medical Device Regulation for service providers). Chino.io Platform introduces a new service (PaaS) into the developers’ market that provides to developers a classical development tool (e.g. a database and REST API) for solving security and legal issues. This helps developers drastically to speed up application development and shorten the time to market. The cloud based and “as a Service” delivery model makes the Chino.io Platform affordable for startups, SMEs and large companies, since it offers a volume-based subscription plans which are extremely scalable. At the same time this approach gives to Chino.io the possibility to assist companies from an early stage and to grow together over time. The eHealth is a big and fast-growing market, and its transition to cloud is speeding up in the recent years. Chino.io team combines unique knowledge on technologies for the healthcare market, cloud technologies for developers, and data protection regulations for healthcare sector. ThThe main outcome of the SME Phase II project will be to bring Chino.io to industrial readiness and maturity (TRL6 to TRL9) for its wide market disruption and penetration in multiple verticals.

Healthcare systems lack flexible AI solutions that allow hospitals to improve efficiency and the quality of patient care. Current solutions provide limited scalability and are confined to isolated applications. Scalable models that address data sharing, integration, privacy, and ethics are needed to to ensure better adoption of AI in healthcare. The AICCELERATE project introduces an approach for scaling up AI-enabled digital solutions for different hospital use cases. AICCELERATE will develop partners’ existing digital solutions further 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 quality of care and health outcomes. It will also enable lean management and effective decision-making. These tools are tested in three pilots that (will) provide feedback for improving the SHCP Engine: (i) patient flow management for ER and surgical units, (ii) digital care pathway for Parkinson’s disease, and (iii) paediatric service delivery. AICCELERATE provides an adaptable model for varied clinical use cases to enhance patient-centric digital care pathways and to optimize patient flow management. Patient empowerment and evidence-based trust towards AI is a key part of the project. The pilots are carried out by 5 hospital partners: Helsinki Univ. Hospital and Oulu Univ. Hospital in Finland, Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù in Italy, Barcelona Children's Hospital in Spain, and Univ. hospital Università degli Studi di Padova in Italy. The other partners of the consortium consist of; Erasmus Univ. Rotterdam from Netherlands, a RTO Fundació Eurecat from Spain, a Spanish non-profit TICBioMed, 6 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, NeuroPath from Belgium, and 2 large enterprises NEC Laboratories Europe from Germany and Innofactor from Finland.

BACKGROUND: Healthcare professionals working in hospitals and those in training to embark on hospital careers experience high levels of stress, especially in the surgical pathways. While interventions to improve wellbeing and resilience exist, not much is known about the right (combination of) intervention(s) for this specific setting. AIM: KEEPCARING aims to (re-)build wellbeing and resilience of healthcare workforce in EU hospitals by co-creating a multi-faceted non-digital, digital and AI-supported solution package to prevent burnout among (aspirant) healthcare professionals on the individual, team, and organisational level. APPROACH: Our multi-sector and interdisciplinary consortium will (1) study stress and stressors experienced by (aspiring) health care providers in their specific setting, (2) evaluate digital and non-digital solutions to reduce stress at an individual and team level, (3) study job crafting among (aspiring) health professionals as a way to reduce stress, and (4) finally, develop a change management platform that, using explainable AI, helps hospital managers as well as surgical caregivers to choose the solutions that match their context. All solutions as well as the portal will be developed in co-creation with end users, including 2 professional associations in our consortium. In addition, legal and ethical expertise is provided across Partners and in Advisory Board to ensure privacy and ethical guidance in this sensitive context. IMPACT: KEEPCARING will provide solutions to improve wellbeing among health care professionals and students, thereby reducing burnout and improving the number of health care students entering the workplace. Our organisational solutions will empower individuals and employers to understand and act on stressful situations in their specific setting. Cost-effectiveness analyses will be used for policy recommendations to ensure sustainable uptake among policy makers, funders, and employers.

Digital health applications are disrupting the healthcare sector by bringing huge innovation and improving the quality of care. However, this innovation brings also some risks since those apps collect and store extremely privacy sensitive data in cloud and mobile environments. According to analysis performed by 39 Data Protection Authorities worldwide in 2014, 85% of the 1.211 analyzed mobile health apps do not comply with data protection laws and security requirements. This behavior puts at serious risk users’ privacy and trust in digital health. Chino helps application developers and enterprises to solve security and privacy law compliance issues by offering a secure platform to manage application users and how they access, store and share health sensitive data. Developers can easily integrate the Chino platform (its API) into their apps to ensure compliance, increase security, speed up application development, shorten time to market, at affordable pay-per-use cost. To ensure security of data transfers and storage Chino applies security-by-design principles and state-of-the-art security mechanisms. From compliance point of view, Chino terms of service define its liabilities and it ensures that the data management is performed according to EU and Member States laws. In addition, Chino is working on ISO 9001 & 27001 certifications, giving more guarantees to its customers. Thanks to its innovative services, the market opportunity, and the EC support (which will speed up the adequate team growth, marketing plan, technological roadmap implementation and international commercialization), the company expect to create over 46 high qualified jobs and generate a turnover over 10M€ by 2020. Furthermore, the overall results of this project will catapult Chino company as a global leader on the digital health & cyber security market.

Europe still sees a quarter of the world's cancer cases each year, making cancer the second leading cause of death and illness in the region after cardiovascular diseases. Unless we take decisive action, lives lost to cancer in the EU are set to increase by more than 24% by 2035, making it the leading cause of death in the EU. Cross-border collaboration can address this challenge by combining data from various modalities and sources, extracting meaningful insights to deepen our understanding of cancer. However, ethical, legal, and national regulations, along with data access processes, including differing interpretations of the EU GDPR create significant hurdles. Technical interoperability issues across European cancer RIs, and patients' and citizens' rights to control who uses their personal information and for what purposes further complicate data sharing. The project will provide European researchers, SMEs, and innovators with a decentralized collaborative network, “UNCAN-CONNECT,” for cancer research. It consists of both technical components, a governance, compliance, and operational framework based on the UNCAN blueprint, with the goal of operationalizing it. The objective is to facilitate access to cancer data, promote open science, and revolutionize cancer research and treatment by co-creating an open-source federation of federations platform. It will be developed using specific use cases focused on six major cancer types: Paediatric, Lymphoid malignancies, Pancreatic cancer, Ovarian, Lung, and Prostate cancers and active collaboration with a diverse range of stakeholders, including researchers, SMEs, industrial end users, and citizens. It will build on existing European RIs such as BBMRI as well as initiatives like EOSC4CANCER, CanSERV, EUCAIM, to enable seamless storage, access, sharing, and processing of data across Member States and associated countries. This approach will foster interoperability and collaboration, accelerating progress in cancer research. This action is part of the Cancer Mission clusters of projects 'Understanding' established in 2022.