MunICT - ICT in Municipal Health and Care services

Municipal care services are facing serious challenges striving to reduce the overall cost of health care, while both the population of elderly people and the demand for flexible services are increasing. The vision of MunICT is Municipal Health and Care services that optimize use of limited human resources through radical and innovative use of technology. Despite significant pilot activity of welfare technologies, few pilots have evolved into large scale services. MunICT aims to demonstrate how resource efficient and high quality services can be obtained in health and care through technology research and innovative service development in close collaboration between the stakeholders. MunICT is based on four core needs in municipal health & care and their related research challenges: - Technology that provides real time decision support in a user-friendly and accessible manner, requiring context awareness and multi-parameter analyses. - Technology that supports resource planning and optimisation, requiring research on optimisation techniques and new algorithms. - Information architecture and new collaboration methods that enable meaningful and efficient information access and sharing, requiring research on information architecture and standards, access control, privacy, semantic technologies, Internet of Things and cloud-based services. - New methods for technology-based service innovation to ensure technology uptake and successful development of new, optimal technology and work processes in parallel. The project will stimulate a much needed service restructuring that revamps the municipal health and care services portfolio. Expected results are better workflow, timely access to updated patient information and better quality of data, freeing time towards the care service objective: to care for persons in need.