Description

The goal of RACE – DATA-BASED RESEARCH IN CARDIOLOGY ON THE APPROPRIATENESS (OF CARE) is to deliver appropriate health care to the patients using less resources.

“Appropriateness” is the degree of suitableness by which the medical/scientific/technical knowledge are employed to diagnose or treat illnesses, and improving this is the only way to deliver better National Health Care services: “deliver the right service to the right subject, at the right time, by the right operator, in the right department”.

In order to do so, evidence-based, innovative infrastructure and software services are deployed. These innovations support medical choices and ease communication between medical personnel and the citizens. The medical choices will be based on clinical and economical evidences provided by the infrastructure. The availability of data on the clinical path (including clinical history, active problems and diagnostic pathway) and on the effectiveness of care are fundamental. At the state of the art the doctors make their choices based on their professional competence and the clinical data from devices.

There are almost no infrastructures nor software systems capable of providing the right decision support to the resource deployment strategies. Today the models and the platforms available to the doctor do not integrate economical information, do not evaluate alternative ways of care (i.e. home care) and do not integrate the patient feedback on the effectiveness and the quality of care, which is a fundamental aspect of health care evaluation.

The objective of RACE is to fill this gap by creating a HW/SW infrastructure that will provide decision support in order to improve the appropriateness of the NHS, and is organised in 3 levels:

• Low-level: and innovative infrastructural bus for semantic interoperability and EHR clinical data collecting;
• Mid-level: Big Data reasoning-oriented repository and backbone tools for integration, normalization, sharing and tracking of patient events;
• High-level: Applications that implement the decision support system, patient empowering tools that give the opportunity to actively participate in the decision making process.