Citizen-centred EU-EHR exchange for personalized health

The project Smart4Health project - Citizen-centred EU-EHR exchange for personalized health, aims to develop a European platform, centred on the citizen and the management of their health data. This platform will enable the empowerment of citizens, as well as the provision of quality patient-centred Health services, as it will allow a secure access of citizens to their respective electronic health records and the possibility to share them across the border of their Country; and additionally it will provide a data infrastructure, promoting research, disease prevention, health and personalized care in order to facilitate communication and interaction between patients and health care providers. This project began in January 2019 and is scheduled to end in February 2023, with overall funding of €21,781,120.

By placing citizens at the centre of the decision making process of their health data, the RAM, through the Smart4Health project, is positioned at the forefront of innovation in the field of digital health, both through the collection, access and sharing of health data, and through the development of personalized health services based on these same data.

Under Smart4Health, the RAM, and specifically the Regional Secretariat of Tourism and Culture (SRTC), is one of the main partners in the dissemination, testing and validation of the Smart4Health platform. UNINOVA is the project coordinator and one of the responsible for the data collection solution in RAM.

With this project, the RAM, specifically through the participation of the SRTC, will provide its citizens and visiting tourists a package of innovative solutions in the area of Health that will allow them to collect health data from a training and/or check-up of the lower back muscles performed in a lumbar extension equipment (MedX). It will prevent and reduce the incidence of low back pain, an application for collecting data from wearable sensors and access to the Smart4Health platform for direct data management (e.g. upload of laboratory results) or connected to the regional hospital for automatic management of its data.

Smart4Health will enable an exchange between electronic health records from European Union (EU) countries, connecting citizens to science and personalized health service. Additionally, this study foresees interoperability, complementarity and cooperativity in the profiles currently used by Member States and Regions.

The Smart4Health solution will be tested in several European Union countries, namely Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Luxembourg and Portugal, and in the national case there will be 2 case studies: 1 continental and 1 insular (RAM).

The case of RAM is the most comprehensive and complete case of the Smart4Health universe by covering all the potential use of the platform, i.e., manual data ingestion, automatic data ingestion from the use of medical devices (MedX machine), automatic data ingestion from the use of wearable medical sensors and automatic data ingestion through the connection to the regional hospital.

To accomplish this goal, Smart4Health will develop, test and validate the prototype of an electronic health record consultation platform between EU countries.

Smart4Health will then allow RAM, namely its citizens and visiting tourists, to manage their health data across the EU and additionally improve their health, increasing their quality of life and general well-being. The RAM is positioned as the great demonstrator of the project and the European reference for other similar regions.