European Projects

Despite large investments in IT, the healthcare domain is currently unable to obtain the desired benefits in quality, safety and efficiency of care and to use the IT systems at their full potential. The lack of integration and of semantic interoperability among the systems deployed is a significant source of inefficiency, data inconsistencies, unnecessary costs and an unacceptably large number of medical errors. As the cost of healthcare in Europe becomes almost unaffordable, reducing the expenses while significantly increasing the quality, safety and efficiency of care is a necessity. Furthermore, the pharmaceutical industry faces low recruitment rates of patients and extremely high costs of running clinical trials due to lack of interoperability and complex and inefficient study execution, while having a strong need to reduce research expenses and the time-to-market of new drugs.

The EURECA project aims to build an advanced, standards-based and scalable semantic integration environment enabling seamless, secure and consistent bi-directional linking of clinical research and clinical care systems to:

1. Support more effective and efficient execution of clinical research by:

• Allowing faster eligible patient identification and enrolment in clinical trials,
• Providing access – in a legally compliant and secure manner – to the large amounts of patient data collected in the EHR systems to be re-used in clinical research, for new hypotheses building and testing (e.g. to benefit rare diseases), study feasibility, as well as for epidemiology studies,
• Enabling long term follow up of patients, beyond the end of a clinical trial,
• Avoid the current need for multiple data entry in the various clinical care and research systems during the execution of a study.

2. Allow data mining of longitudinal EHR data for early detection of patient safety issues related to therapies and drugs that would not become manifest in a clinical trial either due to limited sample size or to limited trial duration, and eliminate duplicate reporting (in care and research) of identified serious side effects,

3. Allow for faster transfer of new research findings and guidelines to the clinical setting (from bench-to-bedside),

4. Enable the healthcare professionals to extract, in the context of each patient’s case, the relevant data out of the overwhelmingly large amounts of heterogeneous patient data and treatment information.

For further information, please visit: http://eurecaproject.eu