iCARDEA

Acronym of the case:

iCARDEA

Web address of the case:

http://www.icardea.eu

Country of the case:

Austria , Germany , Greece , Spain , Turkey

Posting Date:

27 August 2010

Last Edited Date:

06 September 2010

Author:

Asuman Dogac (SRDC Ltd. )

health monitoring | implantable cardiac devices | clinical guidelines

Type of initiative

Project or service

Case Abstract

More than 800,000 patients in Europe have Cardiovascular Implantable Electronic Devices (CIEDs) for the treatment or secondary prevention of cardiac arrhythmias. In addition, the number of follow-up visits for patients with an implanted cardiac device exceeds 5.8 million visits each year, and that number will continue to increase as more devices are implanted. The exponential growth rate of cardiac device implantation calls for new methods of long-term surveillance with a view to optimizing patient safety and care, alleviating the burden of caregivers, and lowering health care costs through ICT support.

The EU co-funded project "iCARDEA: An Intelligent Platform for Personalized Remote Monitoring of the Cardiac Patients with Electronic Implant Devices" will address this challenge, by exploiting competencies of 8 partners from 5 different EU countries, co-ordinated by the SRDC Ltd. These partners are: Software Research and Development and Consultancy Ltd (SRDC), Turkey; OFFIS e.V., Germany; Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft m.b.H (SRFG), Austria; the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas - Institute of Computer Science (FORTH), Greece; Salzburger Landeskliniken BetriebsgesmbH (SALK), Austria; St. Jude Medical Medizintechnik Ges.m.b.H (SJM), Austria; Medtronic IbÃ©rica S.A., Spain; and Hospital Clinic I Provincial de Barcelona (HCPB), Spain.

Description of the case

Domain

eHealth

Topic

Electronic health records | Homecare & Telecare Services | ICT for patient safety | Personal Health Systems | Wearable/Portable Systems for Health monitoring

Sector

Healthcare

Date

February 2010 to February 2013

Date operational

February 2010

Target Users

Add Patients | Health authorities | Health professionals

Target Users Description

The target group of iCARDEA project is the cardiac arrhythmia patients with implanted Cardiac Implantable Electronic Devices (CIEDs) and the people, ranging from next of kins of these patients to physicians, who are in charge of medical care for these cardiac patients.Â According to consensus statementÂ prepared jointly by the Heart Rhythm Society and the European Heart Rhythm Association, more than 800,000 patients in Europe have implanted pacemaker, ICD or CRT devices for the treatment or secondary prevention of cardiac arrhythmias. In addition, the number of follow-up visits for patients with an implanted cardiac device exceeds 5.8 million visits each year, and that number will continue to increase as more devices are implanted.

Scope

International

Status

Research

Language(s)

English

Policy Context and Legal Framework

The iCARDEA Project's objectives are related to the call objectives (ICT Call Priority "Objective ICT-2009.5.1: Personal Health Systems - a) Minimally invasive systems and ICT-enabled artificial organs: a1) Cardiovascular diseases"): - Remote management and treatment of patients with cardiovascular diseases at the point of need - Early diagnosis of further complications by making use of heterogeneous data to build integrative risk assessment models - Providing clinical workflows to support remote applications, addressing also alarms and crisis management with closed loop approaches - Providing continuous, context-aware, multi-parametric monitoring of health parameters, activity, lifestyle, environment and operational parameters of the devices - Analysis and correlation of the multi-parametric data with established biomedical knowledge and expertise to derive clinically relevant and useful information - Providing education and feedback to patients - Patient data security and confidentiality

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

IT infrastructures and products

Overall Implementation approach

Partnerships between administration and/or private sector and/or non-profit sector

Technology choice

Standards-based technology

Funding source

Public funding EU

Project size

Implementation: €1,000,000-5,000,000

Implementation and Management Approach

The iCARDEA project will expose CIED data through standard interfaces to develop an intelligent platform to semi-automate the follow-up of the CIED patients with context-aware, adaptable computer interpretable clinical guideline models. EHR interoperability will be achieved by exposing legacy EHR systems through standard HL7 CDA R2 interfaces so that information about patients' medical history such as the non-cardiac conditions denoting contraindications to the proposed therapies can be obtained from the patient EHR data and used in the clinical follow-up workflow. In addition to EHRs and CIED data, the system will also consume the patient data entered via patients in order to achieve accurate decision making which takes into account user impressions and experience that may not be detected via CIEDs or embedded in EHRs. The Personal Health Record (PHR) system to be developed by iCARDEA will enable patients to access and coordinate their health information to gain the benefits of having their healthcare records and CIED data in a format easily accessible to them. The PHR system will also be used for feedback and the education of the patient. Furthermore, the computer interpretable guideline models to be developed will be adaptable, designed from re-usable building blocks to easily personalize the patient and device follow-up. Then these guideline models will be converted to executable clinical workflows which will perform the follow-up activities and automate the risk assessment via integrative models and hence support medical professionals by automatically assessing the situations and generating alarms.

Technology solution

Due to their limited processing capabilities restricted by their size, CIEDs need to be supported with software running on the data centres. Currently, the data centre processing is standalone with their custom software and proprietary interfaces. iCARDEA will expose CIED data through standard interfaces to develop an intelligent platform to semi-automate the follow-up of CIED patients with context-aware, adaptable computer interpretable clinical guideline models.

The computer interpretable guideline models to be developed will be designed from re-usable building blocks to facilitate personalization of the patient care and follow-up workflow. The CIED data will be exposed through standard interfaces based on the HL7, ISO/IEEE 11073 standards and the IHE IDCO Profile.

EHR and PHR interoperability will be achieved by exposing legacy EHR/PHR systems through standard HL7 CDA and IHE Care Management Profile interfaces so that information about patients' medical history (such as the non-cardiac conditions denoting contraindications to the proposed therapies) can be obtained from the patient EHR/PHR data and used in the clinical follow-up workflow.