IRHIS: Interoperable Remote Health Innovation brought to Scale
IRHIS boosts the EU toward the next phase of our healthcare system: Out of eight AI healthcare application areas, Wearable AI is expected to have the largest impact, saving up to 313,000 lives, enabling €50.6 billion of potential savings and free up 336 million hours every year. IRHIS will accelerate the upscale of remote health innovations and innovators offering AI-powered, cutting-edge sensor solutions, wearable devices, and remote monitoring solutions across three of the most critical EU remote care areas: Musculoskeletal rehabilitation, neurological disorder treatment, and critical patient conditions. Within IRHIS we create the first EU-wide Advanced Remote Care Demonstration Chain around 3 DemoScale Labs meant to collaboratively demonstrate and scale Advanced Remote Care Tech Champions across Less Developed Regions (LDR).
Leading Institution: Health Technology Cluster iVITA- LATVIA
Budget: 8 426 346 million euros | Duration: 3 years
Partnership: 21 organizations from 12 countries – Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Romania, Ukraine
Targeted diseases: Musculoskeletal diseases, Neurology and ICU
Outcomes: Consolidated EU Remote Care Innovation System
The IRHIS ecosystem and its 3 interregional Demonstration and Scaling Labs will be built on the following pillars:
Pillar1 – Innovation acceleration: Demonstrate a portfolio of 3 interregional investments of 8 technologies developed by EU MedTech SMEs (cf. map in section 1.3), to jointly boost and deploy innovative remote care solutions, embedding Scale-Ups from transition and less developed regions into global value chains.
Pillar 2 – Involving R&D experts and the 4-Helix for up-scaling: Involving advanced RTO capabilities, care givers and patients emphasizes the strong collaborative dimension across all levels of development. The 3 DemoScale labs will facilitate the demonstration of 8 key TRL6+ technologies and accelerate their faster market uptake.
Pillar 3 – Improve access to finance and trigger replication in LDR: To ensure high adoption and market deployment and full coverage of the value chain as well as of the quadruple helix, the IRHIS consortium is completed with various MedTech Clusters. They will conduct capacity building activities, leverage public and private investments from regions and unlock relevant ecosystem empowerment activities around the 3 DemoScale Labs
Pillar 4 – Developing thriving interregional Ecosystems: IRHIS will federate less developed, transition and developed regions around joint innovation investments and will support the advancement of regional smart specialisation around the shared S3 priority Medical Technology towards commercialisation and scale-up.
Demo Scale Lab 1 – Joint Musculoskeletal Care Demonstration.
In Europe, there are 28 million patients diagnosed with knee and/or hip Osteoarthritis (OA), and a total of ~840 000 total knee replacements (TKR) and ~600 000 total hip replacement (THR) surgeries are performed annually. The demographic shift and skills shortage requires alternative solutions to support pre- and post-operational musculoskeletal rehabilitation.
The objective is to 1) scale up the companies behind 3 medical sensor technologies and 2) to combine them into an innovative remote care platform. IRHIS will leverage the gathered data from various sensors with intelligent learning models to personalize clinical paths, with a focus on cardiovascular and orthopaedic parameters. It aims to improve patient rehabilitation journeys and offer value-driven insights for both post-rehab patients and sport practitioners while ensuring regulatory compliance and cross-device interoperability.
Demo Scale Lab 2 – Demonstrating Advanced Neurological Sensing and Treatment.
Patients with neurological disorders are often misdiagnosed, or only correctly diagnosed after lengthy delays preventing diagnostic understanding and appropriate treatments2.
The objective is to combine an automated rehab technology encompassing a range of neurological disorders (reducing the number of misdiagnoses by 30%), while focusing on tremors including Parkinson and lactate sensor technology to improve prevention and rehabilitation. They will feed into an innovative Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) Platform. Thus, patient outcomes and their quality of life can be improved, costs can be reduced, and in particular access to and resource planning in rehabilitation facilities can be optimized.
Demo Scale Lab 3 – Critical Patient Condition Detection Tech Upscale.
Intensive care units (ICU) see a lot of damaging conditions. Among them, Sepsis is a global health crisis. It affects 50 million people every year, 11 million of whom die – 1 death every 2.8 seconds. 20% of worldwide deaths are associated with sepsis. In an ICU it comes with a wide range of other conditions
(e.g., ~1 of 4 people living with cardiovascular disease(s), that usually is undiagnosed or diagnosed at a late stage).
The objective is to enhance and integrate various sensors, including glucose, humidity, and lactate sensors, into a breakthrough intensive care (ICU) remote monitoring solution, alongside the development of AI predictive analytics. This enables to predict and prevent deterioration of patients with e.g., early sepsis at the emergency department, improves patient care, and reduces healthcare costs.
EE-Hub
