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Updated: Feb 1, 97 |
Global results and European added value | |
The full list of projects' partners is also re-assembled in the present volume, in the form of a Directory of Partners, sorted in alphabetic order by country. This section provides a practical tool for quick reference in search of organisations involved in projects from a specific country, university or company, and may be useful for decision makers and prospective associates for learning first hand from their national fellows experiences. Nevertheless, the list is not exhaustive, as in many cases, projects did involve a wider range of participants in various modalities, i.e. panels of experts or users, advisory boards, verification sites, etc. As this constituency-in-large of consortia was not contractually bond to the Commission services, but only to the prime contractor or other partners in the consortium, their details are not reflected, but project leaders should be in a position to provide further information to interested readers.
It is important that all the actors become more aware of opportunities for European cooperation and create framework conditions between users, providers, industry and academia.
The European component of research and technological development is the essential and sound basis for international collaboration strengthening the competitiveness of European industry. Europe cannot afford the fragmentation of the market and waste the scarce research resources in duplicating or even multiplying the RTD efforts.
What is really needed in European research, is better information, greater mobility and transparency as well as cooperation and mainly synergy. It is crucial that all the opportunities, offered by the single internal market, are exploited.
The role of the European Union in this context is an enabling one, the role of a catalyst, providing a framework for active international collaboration on RTD
What the projects started to develop in the 3rd Framework Programme and what they are continuing on, are harmonised applications in health care telematics between different European countries. In order to interconnect the health telematics "islands" in an interoperable and compatible way, platforms to enable interconnectivity are indispensable. A common European approach is necessary, in order to be able to offer European wide health care telematics networks. This in turn will enable to come closer to the objective of equal access to health care services across Europe for the benefit of the citizen.
By 1991, at the outset of the Telematic Systems Programme, substantial progress had already been achieved in health care telematics standards in Europe. Building upon the activities of the AIM Exploratory Action 1988-1990, the CEN (Comite Europeen de Normalisation) had established a technical committee to address the specific standardisation needs of telematics applications in the health sector. This committee, called CEN TC 251 "Medical Informatics" had adopted a detailed programme of work and established the initial working groups and project teams to develop technical specifications. Therefore, at the beginning of the programme, the newly created framework for the development of standards was in place. The challenge was to make it work.
During the execution of the Telematic Systems Programme, the collaboration between the pre-normative RTD activities and the standardisation work in CEN TC 251 has been very fruitful. The interaction and complementarity among the communities of participants in the Telematic Systems Programme and CEN has been very intense. This has favoured the immediate take up of results from many Telematic Systems Programme projects, as a basis for the work of the different project teams that elaborated standardisation proposals. There has also been frequent interaction between research and standardisation approaches in the workshops and conferences to diffuse the results of these activities.
At the end of the Telematic Systems Programme, thanks to the fruitful co-operation among the European research and standardisation activities, and the enthusiastic contribution from many national and regional groups and organisations, the progress that has been achieved in standardisation in health care telematics is very significant.
More than ten European CEN standards, draft standards and reports have been issued. The functioning of the different standards-making groups and decision-making committees has been consolidated. But above all, the European standardisation activities have become a reference point for those responsible for implementation of new systems and identification of trends and requirements for the future.
Every new phase offers new challenges. The progress already achieved shed light on new and more ambitious objectives. The collaboration between European RTD and standardisation work must continue, but now, the challenges to be faced will be more in the areas of both the attainment of standardisation solutions of global scope and the stronger commitment of industry in these activities, which should lead to an optimal collaboration of the private and public sectors in the implementation of advanced health care telematics. See in Annex the List of standardisation results (CEN/TC 251 Standards)
During the 3rd Framework Programme the AIM office has had it as a policy not to hand out any project generated deliverables and reports to third parties. This was done in order to ensure, that no confidential material ever was given out, and to reduce the amount of multiplication work. The only exemptions being the Edited Reports for Publication, which were produced for this purpose and normally formed part of a book edited by the AIM office. This policy is still valid, thus it is necessary to contact the projects partners to obtain any of this project related documentation, and in most cases it is up to them to decide to what extent these results, which are their intellectual property, can be given away and under what conditions.
The publication of relevant quality books in co-operation with IOS Press in the "Studies in Health Technology and Informatics" series in The Netherlands, has continued and the books are now bought by many libraries, refereed in several periodicals and listed in the "right indexes". This ensures a broad dissemination of results and creates awareness of and interest for the activities sponsored by DG XIII.
With respect to concrete commercial exploitation, the AIM office benefited from a study commissioned by VALUE, the specific European programme for dissemination and exploitation of R&TD results. The work was carried out by the Danish Technology Transfer institute, and lead to the production of a report in November 1995 ([1]). This confidential publication served as the basis for an internal DG XIII report([2]), that has been a major contribution to the present volume.
In Figure 21 a summary of the commercially exploitable results is included. It refers to a universe of 47 R&TD projects (shared-costs projects), that by the end of 1995 were already exploiting commercially some results or spin-off, or were planning to do so. The most striking figures indicates that 10 of those projects (21%), have already products in the commercialisation process, and 3 of them have project products being used by the majority of the European specialists in the area (6.4%). In total, 17 projects have results which are already developing in a commercial phase (more than 1/3 of the total analysed). If those results are analysed against the background of the programme being a pre-competitive and pre-normative one, the figures show a very successful accomplishment.
These results appear as being balanced, and could allow for further improvements and market impact, as resources are in place, both in many member countries and at the European level, to take research results to a further exploitation phase. The former VALUE programme, then on called INNOVATION programme, aims at helping in the process of dissemination of results and exploitation of projects work, by helping writing business plans, matching consortia with potentially interested investors, seeking for risk capital, etc.
| Project products | No |
|---|---|
| On the market | 2 |
| On the commercialisation process | 10 |
| Being used by the majority of European specialists in the area | 3 |
| Being commercialised by non-industrial partners | 1 |
| Where commercialisation activities are planned | 1 |
| Total | 17 |
Total analysed: 47 projects 17 projects have results which are already developing in a commercial phase (more than 1/3 of the total analysed) |
It is an accepted fact in the R&TD world that out of a given number of projects in any subject, a 3-tier outcome is usually observed, where 1/3 has excellent results, 1/3 has medium-acceptable results, and 1/3 will have poor or unsatisfactory results. If we would have to measure the success of the AIM programme only by results entering a commercialisation phase, which is not the case because there are many other factors to assess, as it has been extensively discussed in the present volume, the 1/3 in excess of projects that are already there would coincide with the upper third. The intermediate second-third would be the cohort that may best benefit of initiatives like VALUE-INNOVATION, the EUREKA framework, or any other European or national opportunities to reach the market.
However, it must be stressed that in the case of telematics for health, the global achievements can not only be measured by the satisfactory completion of a list of deliverables. In other cases, projects results are of a more intangible nature and therefore difficult to measure. Examples of the former would be the psychological, organisational and/or institutional changes resulting of the awareness obtained or lessons learned from participation in a project and the work done on a specific problem area. Moreover, the concrete possibility of improving the overall efficiency of the health sector may have direct and indirect effects in achieving a better quality of medical care, use of resources, diminishing of duration or extension of illnesses, with the obvious consequence of alleviating human suffering and avoidable and premature mortality, which is very difficult to measure. The developing domain of technology assessment, in refining its tools for the specificity of the use of telematics in health, may bring us new enlightenment in the years to come in this respect.
Overall, the European Communities programmes, and the AIM and telematics for health care activities can also confirm it, have made possible to participants to collaborate with their neighbours in other European countries. Research groups have highly praised this effect, as in the past, many of them had more contacts with fellow colleagues in the USA for example, that with other laboratories across the border.
The closing of the AIM programme and the signalling of the future activities took place at a large successful conference in December 1994 in Lisbon, The Cultural Capital of Europe that year. The conference was co-organised by the Portuguese Ministry of Health and the AIM office. With more than 900 participants this pivotal point in the programme was a major result in itself, both supporting the dissemination of results from the 3rd framework Programme and strengthening the awareness of "the new culture" under the 4th Framework Programme. The first call for proposals being almost simultaneous with the Lisbon Conference, the event also represented a good opportunity for both experienced and new participants in proposals to get together and prepare future EU activities.
The closed or closing projects presented and demonstrated their results organised as project villages in accordance with the Project Lines developed for the concertation mechanism. Diverse AIM activities were marked as satellite workshops etc.
Plenary sessions marked the state of affairs in Europe and North America, on-line demonstrations and teleconferences were employed, and the road ahead was marked by users, decision makers and industrial representatives participating actively. The European Commission, represented by General Director Michel Carpentier via Teleconferencing from Brussels ensured its full support to future R&D activities in Health Care Telematics.
The whole event is documented in the publication "Health in the new Communications Age - Health Care Telematics for the 21st Century" (see bibliography).
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