HORIZON

• Mr. Din Ghani
  

  The Mari Group Ltd
  Boldon Business Park UK-Tyne & Wear UK-NE35 9PE Boldon United Kingdom	tel: 44 19 15 19 19 91 fax: 44 19 15 19 19 90 din.ghani@mari.co.uk
  url:

• Improvement of the quality, consistency and cost-effectiveness of healthcare across Europe requires that every healthcare professional should be able to apply up-to-date and relevant best practice (based where possible on best evidence from research) in his/her field. For this to happen, the flow of information and expertise between researchers and practitioners, between specialists and non-specialists, and between those who have knowledge and those who need it, has to be improved. The ACTION cluster comprises 9 distinct projects each addressing a different aspect of the use of telematics to support such information flows. In order to maximise impact, the projects focus on oncology as a target area, while keeping the applications as generic as possible.

Purpose:

• The 9 ACTION projects are all closely related, forming complementary parts of the overall picture; however for practical reasons, they are self-contained separately-managed projects. The primary purpose of HORIZON therefore is to attempt to crystallise and animate the cluster identity of the ACTION group. It will co-ordinate those aspects which will benefit from a common approach, while allowing the individual projects to proceed independently. By providing focus for the ACTION cluster as a whole, HORIZON will amplify the impact on European healthcare.

Methods:

• HORIZON will involve a small highly focused team that will carry out pro-active coordination and consensus building across the ACTION projects. The ACTION team will facilitate Co-operation between projects through managed workshops and conferences, as well as through telematics means. In particular, the TeleSCAN WWW server developed in the MARIA project under the 3rd Framework will be used for this, and for more general dissemination of the results of ACTION. The team will track and analyse the activities and achievements of the individual ACTION projects in order to form a clear architectural overview and understanding of the whole picture. As part of pulling together the individual threads, HORIZON has an element of planning for a major validation trial which will integrate the results of the ACTION projects.

Expected results:

• A key result will be the ACTION model: a coherent model for the exploitation of telematics for healthcare that can inform and support policy and investment decisions in both R&D and infrastructure development at EU and member state levels. This model will underpin other outputs from HORIZON such as publications, conferences, position papers and standards profiles, enabling ACTION projects to form complementary, interoperable systems which can be jointly exploited to reach a critical mass of users. HORIZON will develop co-ordinated plans for larger-scale validation of the integrated results from the various projects.