Smart health

The health and care sector faces great societal and economic challenges. In order to be able to respond to these challenges, heatlh project are focusing their efforts on digital healthcare innovation - from fundamental academic research to bringing to market practical solutions that could hold substantial societal and economic value for the Flemish health and care system.

Some example projects:

• Promobed - Predicting and Modelling Bed Capacity (Vlaio innovation project, 2018-2020)

Promobed aims at supporting hospitals with their long-term strategic decision, by developing a tool that builds on the combination of parameter correlation studies to forecasts healthcare trends, and a simulation tool that allows for what-if scenarios. The task of the TE team is to develop the simulation tool of the project, thereby making sure it is flexible enough to support multiple strategic decisions for different types of international hospitals. In the meantime, this project resulted in a successful simulation tool, Caspr.

• HIPS - Innovation through coordinated and optimized Patient, Supply and information flows in Hospitals (iMinds ICON project, 2014-2015)

This project aims to optimally coordinate the management processes of available resources in a hospital (goods, staff, equipment) and the associated information flows with the patient care process, and this in a flexible and transparent way to keep operational KPIs in balance. The techno-economic workload in this project primarily consists of both the modeling and simulating of as-is and to-be hospital processes, in order to perform KPI analyses. The HIPS project won the Agoria eHealth Award for ‘best ICT project that improves quality systems and optimizes processes’.

• OCareClouds - Organizing Care through trusted Cloudy-like Services (iMinds ICON project, 2012-2014)

The O’CareCloudS team pursued the creation of a platform that can capture, aggregate and enrich loads of data about the medical condition and (real-time) assistance requirements of people in a home care context, and share those insights in an intelligent way with formal and informal caregivers alike. The team’s ultimate objective: allowing people to live as autonomously as possible, for as long as possible, while offloading – and maximizing the efficiency of – caregivers.