Author: 
Lydia Montandon, CrowdHEALTH Project Coordinator
Partner: 
Atos Spain Sa

 

Dear friends,

This is our first blog post! We are now reaching the 10th month of the CrowdHEALTH project and our compromise is to write in our blog least once per month, to inform about the project’s progresses.

Partners have now produced several deliverables that will soon be made public. They will report about it in next posts! But first, here are a few introductory words about the project.

Nowadays, healthcare planners, policy makers, clinicians and biomedical researchers - not to mention patients and citizen – all need both reliable and accurate data and IT services able to extract meaningful information from that data. And there is a lot of data related to health out there!

Not only is health information recorded (hopefully digitally) each time a patient visits a health centre, information that is usually stored in a personal health dossier or Electronic Health Record (EHR), but there is additional interesting data that can be extracted from other sources. Have you thought that what you eat may have an impact on your health? Or what you do, in terms of physical activity on a daily basis? Usually, this information is not stored in a standard EHR.

So, what CrowdHEALTH proposes is to create Holistic Health Records (HHR)! HHRs are structured health records that may include several types of information that are relevant to a patient’s health status, such as laboratory medical data, clinical data, lifestyle data collected by the patient or related people, social care data, or physiological and environment data collected by medical devices and sensors (D3.1).

But CrowdHEALTH goes beyond creating a new model to store health related information. The proposed platform architecture (D2.4) also considers several other aspects, such as a data source and gateway framework, enabling the acquisition of multimodal data from various data sources (D3.5), a data cleaner & sources verifier component to address the volatility of the information provision as well as the reliability of the data sources, and other interesting components, which will be revealed in subsequent blogs.

As the project is dealing with Big Data, several modules are being designed and developed to allow for data acquisition and storage in the CrowdHEALTH Big Data platform.  Partners have described the information aggregation component, which allows combining a number of disparate data sources into a common format and store information in a form that makes it available for analytics, simulations and decision making (D4.7) and the security and privacy framework that assures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the data managed and processed within the scope of the Project (D4.17).

Another aspect on which CrowdHEALTH focuses is the development of innovative data-driven analytical tools for supporting policy makers develop healthcare policies. The work up to now has focused on population-level risk stratification, employing machine learning tools for stratifying segments of the population into different levels of risk (D5.3) and on the causal analysis framework focusing on the analysis of actions and events to estimate the applicability and the effectiveness of the current health policies referring to a specific case (D5.15).

Let us not forget that CrowdHEALTH is not only about technology research and development, but it addresses real needs and expectations of several complementary Use Cases that will pilot and validate the Project’s results (D6.7). Each Use Case provides specific sets of data, which aggregation, analysis and visualisation will be of support to policy makers. You will read about them too!

Finally, the project has already produced an initial Market Analysis and Business Potential report. Although this deliverable will not be entirely available to the public, it shows that the consortium has already views about how partners, health stakeholders and society can benefit from the project results.

I count on you to follow our regular postings, which will be announced on our Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts!

In the meantime, I wish you all a great start of 2018, full of success and rewards!

 

Lydia Montandon

CrowdHEALTH Project Coordinator