Software ecosystem for e-Health
The project was presented as part of the National Operational Program “Research and Competitiveness” 2007-2013 (PONR&C) for the Convergence Regions, Action “Public-private laboratories and related networks”. The Laboratory that carried out the project includes 2 major companies, 10 SMEs, 6 Research Bodies and 2 Universities. The CNR Institutes involved were ICAR, IBB, IMM, and IBP. The project aimed to design and implement a software ecosystem consisting of models, services, and tools for the implementation of applications to support diagnosis, therapy, and follow-up, as well as for the innovative management of health processes. This ecosystem, acting as a collector of all the actors that interact in various ways in social and health processes, was conceived with the aim of facilitating data integration, real-time alignment, advanced interoperability, and cooperation between the various public and private actors in compliance with the standards of the sector. The developed ecosystem has included a broad spectrum of ICT technologies, services, and tools functional to the health system, essentially aimed at supporting the need for change by working on four lines of intervention: interoperability, necessary to make the existing applications able to communicate each other and to interconnect structures and data, guaranteeing security, privacy, and confidentiality (interoperable eHealth); reliable telemonitoring and telemedicine systems (pervasive eHealth); knowledge technologies to support diagnosis, therapy, and rehabilitation health processes for the rationalization and control of healthcare expenditure (sustainable eHealth); predictive medicine, aimed at early diagnosis and achieving a correct lifestyle (preventive eHealth). In order to achieve these goals, the software ecosystem has been organized into infrastructure services, technology platforms, and meta-services. The technological platforms implemented are capable of managing health processes, supporting clinical decisions, mobile healthcare, signal analysis, image diagnostics, advanced visualization, behavioral analysis, virtual rehabilitation, health information systems management, management of medical information in social networking. At the end of the project, 7 demonstrators were developed for experimenting the effectiveness of the eHealthNet ecosystem realized in operating conditions similar to the real ones.
