|
|
|
|
|
Updated: Feb 1, 97 |
4. Programme management, implementation and impact | |
In view of the financial limitations, modifications and significant reductions in the proposed project budgets were recommended, to practically all proposals. This required a sense of balance between the need to reduce the possible financial allocation to proposals, and still allow them to become viable projects. After the consultation process with the Management Committee, a total of 37 proposals were approved for funding. On this basis, the Commission services carried out negotiations with the proposers to agree on a concrete project contract and technical annex, defining very precisely the work to be done. All these project were started the 1st January 1992.
| No. of Proposals received | 193 |
| Funds available | 77 Million Ecu |
| Over-subscription | x 10 |
| Final No. of actions funded | 37 projects +5 concerted actions +1 accompanying measure |
| % of total of proposals | 19.1% |
The recommendations of the Telematics Management Committee (TMC) and the Working Party of national representatives (WP-Health Care), also indicated the need to setting up some additional concerted actions and accompanying measures. Preparatory workshops took place during 1992, leading to the establishment of 5 concerted actions on nursing, primary care, resources management and case-mix, education and the medical record.
A special accompanying measure was proposed to secure the coverage of strategic issues and of consensus formation, also with the objective of involve in AIM additional academic institutions, health services and industries from countries and regions that had not been involved in the previous phase. This initiative led to the establishment, some time later, of the ACOSTA project.
The selected projects present the full range of types of participant, including telecommunication operators and service suppliers, informatics and computer industry, biomedical equipment manufacturers, health care providers, professional associations and individual experts. More than half the projects are led by industrial/commercial organisations followed by academic/research institutions. Academic institutions continue to maintain the highest rate of total participants.
| Type of organisation | No. of participants |
|---|---|
| Universities | 104 |
| Telecom/IT Industry | 59 |
| Government / Research | 43 |
| Hospitals | 30 |
| Service Providers | 23 |
| Other industry | 11 |
| Others | 10 |
| Telecom operators | 3 |
On the whole the participation of industry, especially that of large industry had increased since the Exploratory Action. One of the reasons for some criticism of the Exploratory Action was that it was not sufficiently focused. Usually industry, and especially small and medium enterprises, prefer a step-by-step approach consolidating a sequence of successes from where to penetrate the market.
The density of linkage is certainly more evident between academia and industry or hospitals than between industrial partners and the health care sector. The fact that some projects involve quite a large number of partners from the same country is one of many indicators that co-ordination must take place with national actions.
Following the second and complementary call in September 1993, 8 further R&D projects and 1 Accompanying Measure joined the ranks in 1993 and 1994 and several projects from the first call were strengthened.
The emphasis was on building prototypes and pilot applications, as a first step prior to commercial exploitation. The overall goal was the acceptance by the users and to demonstrate compliance with regulations and standards.
During the execution of the programme 3 R&TD projects chose for various reasons to close down before time.
To achieve synergy between the different projects, the action was developed under the unifying objective of developing tools, techniques and practices supporting a common European approach to health care informatics and telecommunications.
A number of workshops, conferences and exhibitions have been supported and/or organised by the AIM office and some internal and external publications have documented the activity and planned for the future. Facts finding trips to Canada and Japan were organised. Visits, documentation and ideas have been exchanged with relevant persons and institutions in the USA and Canada.
There have been approximately 370 partners, with 470 recorded participants in the activities. All EC and EFTA countries have been involved. In the Directory of Partners section a more detailed breakdown of types of participants by country is provided.
When the AIM Programme started, it has been recognised that it is crucial that the AIM Programme as a whole is as consistent and coherent as possible, and not simply a set of unconnected projects. In order to facilitate the strategic co-ordination of the AIM projects and other accompanying activities, a concertation process has been instituted for this purpose. There was a common understanding that an effective and efficient concertation activity, especially among those projects, grouped according to their main focus into so-called Project Lines, would have by far much more impact than to leave all the projects work fully independently, possibly even without knowing what the other projects are doing. This is in particular the case, when some underlying structures like frameworks, platforms, architectures, methodologies etc. are to be developed, and to be foreseen for use in a wider context.
The selected projects have been therefore analysed concerning their objectives and work to be performed and grouped into the Project Lines (project lines), each of them representing a domain of applications or technologies. The originally 37 projects, and after the 2nd Call in 1993 altogether more than 50 projects and accompanying actions have been grouped into 7 project lines. The main purpose of the project lines was to ensure and increase the synergy and to work towards the mission of the project lines, defined by the projects in it. All projects and the project lines met in the framework of Concertation meetings 4-5 times a year for 2 days each in Brussels. The project lines meetings served the projects to receive information on the status and progress of work of the other projects in the project lines, to inform the projects in the project lines about progress in related areas. It was a useful forum for discussing items of common interest. The projects identified work and deliverables from other projects which could be of help in co-ordinating the results. It has been identified, for which particular work items the projects in the project lines would appreciate help from other projects, and, vice versa, to which projects help can be offered.
The project lines was perceived as an excellent forum for workshops, either mainly addressing the projects within the own project lines or, also inviting projects from another project lines, being nevertheless open to all interested projects. The meetings of the project lines took place as a rule during the Concertation meetings but, at some opportunities also one day before or after the Concertation meeting, if such a workshop was a full day event. In that case, also experts outside the AIM Programme attended the project lines meeting.
It is the chance and the challenge at the same time to tailor the work of the project lines in such a way that the projects take profit out of the complementarity of the work, while working towards a common objective. The work in the project lines can be seen also as the natural place for birth of new, integrated projects, taking into account the experiences and the know-how of the projects in the project lines, possessing an overall view, hence, enabling to provide more value for money.
Concluding, the concertation mechanism and the concept of Project Lines was found very useful and has been taken over also for the 4th Framework Programme.
To put remedial action to some of the gaps that the above situation produced, the programme management, in agreement with the Telematics Programme Committee and the Healthcare Working Party promoted the establishment of a series of accompanying measures, concerted actions and strategic studies, for a more balanced attainment of the programmes objectives.
Some of those have already been listed above, when they came clearly together to a certain project line or project grouping. In addition, the following actions have also been part of the Programme:
| ACOSTA: | Consensus Formation and Standardisation Promotion |
| ECOTELSA: | A case study for a technical and cost analysis or telecommunications requirements for the development of health care telematics |
| EDICON: | A case study on the concept of the European Distributed Consulting Hospital |
| METROPOLIS: | Telecommunications Services for Health Care Added Value: Strategies for telematics systems in metropolitan areas to improve health care delivery |
| TELECARE | Inventory of the use of Telematics in the EC |
| TELEMEDICINA-SIP: | Consensus and Strategy for Promoting Health Care Telematics in Europe |
DG III: Industry
In 1990 the Commission launched the PHARE programme. The main aim of the PHARE programme is to contribute to the reconstruction of the economy, environment, education etc. in the countries involved. The Commission decided to supplement the PHARE activities by specific co-operation projects in science and technology under the name PECO-COPERNICUS. The objectives of COPERNICUS are to enhance collaborative research and development which plays an important role in the conversion context by promoting S&T co-operation of priority subjects across Europe, by developing and enhancing the existing scientific expertise and by promoting technology transfer to the mutual benefit of the Central and Eastern European and EU partners.
In the period 1992-1993, five types of action were launched under PECO-COPERNICUS 92/93: fellowships, support for conferences and scientific networks, joint projects, support for participation in COST projects and in the five programmes of the 3rd Framework Programme open the CEEC. These actions have served to finance over 3.200 projects for a total of ECU 93 million. Three of these projects were managed also by the AIM office, namely CAMIREMA-EAST which was a continuation of the CAMIREMA Concerted action, MUM project that dealt with Management of Uncertainty in Medicine and the PRIMAS project on the Precision Real-Time Image-Based Motion Analysis System at Economical Cost.
In 1994, the support of scientific networks (also called Concerted Actions) and for joint projects was continued under the heading COPERNICUS 1994. As a result of the 1994 Call for Proposals which was co-organised with the AIM office further three Concerted actions and projects were adopted and managed by the AIM office. Those were projects EURO-AAP-Information Technology for Quality Assurance in Acute Abdominal Pain, project INTCNIT - Information technologies for National and International Co-operation and the EAST TELEMEDICINE SET UP concerted action whose objective is to define and implement standard medical and operational procedures for telemedicine in isolated areas. Further details can be found in the publications COPERNICUS 1992 and COPERNICUS 1994 of the European Commission.
The first experiences concerning co-operation with the developing world were initiated in 1992 by the participation of AIM representatives to the Ministerial World Conference on Malaria held in Amsterdam, and by encouraging the WHO project called MANTEAU. This initiative provides a framework for the diffusion of knowledge and the gathering of epidemiological information, with respect to malaria and other tropical diseases (the number one cause of disease world wide), with the help of telematics and multimedia. In March 1993 a joint AIM-WHO workshop on Telematics in Malaria and other Tropical Diseases, was held in Brussels, in support of MANTEAU. The bridge between the previous initiatives and towards more comprehensive international co-operation was the AIM study EpiAim (for more details see Volume 2). The objective of this study was to explore prospects concerning the health sector and the use of telematics technologies, in Africa and Latin America. The knowledge resulting from the action contributed to achieve a better European understanding of prevailing situations and trends, an open up opportunities for further co-operation between the European Union and those regions. The above experiences and others have made possible to a number of interested parties in the "AIM community" to get more deeply involved with developing countries, then on under the umbrella of the new EU programme International Cooperation - Developing Countries (INCO-DC).
Within the scope of the Canada-EU Co-operation Plan for Directorate XIII-C, the Health Care Telematics sector in collaboration with the International Co-operation Unit has commissioned a Fact Finding Mission to Canada. This Mission was held from September 24 to October 7, 1994 with a final European expert delegation of nine people. The main objective of the mission was to identify projects and/or programmes across Canada that could be of interest for eventual collaboration initiatives within the context of the Fourth Framework Programme.
| |
 |
 |
|
|
Copyright 1997 © EHTO All rights reserved This server is the only official EHTO WWW knowledge repository. Mail suggestions to: webmaster@ehto.org |