CrowdHEALTH: Introduction

 

CrowdHEALTH will deliver a ground-breaking approach reflected in its integral big data platform, which will incorporate techniques addressing the complete data path – i.e. modelling and interpretation, cleaning and collection, automatic interrelation, distributed storage, and real-time analysis of health information.

CrowdHEALTH also introduces the concept of Holistic Health Records to take health information to the next level through the inclusion of additional health determinants (e.g. genomics, nutrition, lifestyle, environment, etc).

One of the key strengths of CrowdHEALTH is its generalized approach: it addresses specific needs in terms of policy developments, diseases prevention, root causes analysis, generation of evidence, etc, while also being open, extensible and thus applicable to different contexts and uses (such as medication plans efficiency, and personalized health advices based on automatically identified behavioural patterns). The latter will be feasible through the specific outcomes of CrowdHEALTH: Data-as-a-Service and Data Toolkit, which will allow any stakeholder in the health ecosystem to express in a declarative way their analytical needs and perform their processing (e.g. forecasting) on the holistic health data.

In terms of “health in all policies”, CrowdHEALTH goes beyond existing approaches in two ways: (i) by including cross-domain KPIs in policies enabling them to be correlated with all determinants captured in holistic health records and with information from other domains such as education, environment and health economics and (ii) by compiling multi-modal tailored policies in terms of time-scales (long- / short- term), locations (area, regional, national, international), populations, and evolving risks. Direct involvement of public health authorities acting as policy decision makers is ensured through the Regional Health Ministry of Valencia (stating in their letter that they will be actively involved in the project in collaboration with HULAFE partner), the National Organization for Health Care Services Provision in Greece (partner) and the National Institute of Public Health in Slovenia (partner).

The CrowdHEALTH six (6) use cases is also a key aspect of the project since they have been selected to be different in terms of corresponding policies, real-world data sources / devices heterogeneity, data formats, analysis needs, information to be included in the holistic records, target groups (e.g. people suffering from chronic diseases but also children and youth), and environments (care centers, social networks, public environments, living labs, diseases monitoring at home). Key reference institutions (such as Karolinska and La Fe hospitals) will act as CrowdHEALTH evangelists with other hospitals and health care providers at world level.

CrowdHEALTH provides also a unique opportunity with respect to its potential impact. Not only it addresses a wide set of “end users” - public authorities, health organisations, experts and researchers, as well as patients, care givers, informal carers - but its impact is ensured by the strength of the consortium. CrowdHEALTH will put in practice and in real-world scenarios its results: more than 200.000 users will be engaged through the use cases and more than 5.000 health institutions / entities will be addressed through EFMI. For example, the public environment use case is implemented in all Slovenian schools (covering the entire children population aged 6-18). CrowdHEALTH will utilize the current 7.5 million measurements from 1 million people while more than 200.000 per year will also be monitored. The rest use cases span across 5 countries, engaging additionally 2.500 users and exploiting 2 million health records and 700.000 streams of lifestyle activities and nutrition data.