UBITECH participates in the kick-off meeting, in Nicosia, Cyprus of the eHealth4U Cypriot integrated project, officially started on October 2nd, 2019. The project is co-funded by the “Research in Enterprises” action of the multi-annual development framework of Programmes RESTART 2016-2020 for the support of Research, Technological Development and Innovation in Cyprus (Grant Agreement No. ΙNTEGRATED/0916/0030) and spans on the period October 2019 – March 2022. The eHealth4U project aims to successfully implement a Cyprus EHR thus a) improving the communication between private and public sectors, primary and secondary/tertiary care, b) increasing patients’ empowerment and patients’ education, c) enabling clinical audit and clinical guidelines introduction, d) avoidance of duplication of tests, abuse and corruption, e) increasing patient safety via reduction of medical errors or incomplete health record.
In particular, eHealth4U intends to realize a well-designed and prosperous healthcare system in Cyprus by incorporating a successful and integrated EHR platform, as an operational and functional entity, making all involved stakeholders from the quadruple helix (research centres, higher education institutions, enterprises, policy makers, and other interested organisations) to collaborate closely and have clear and converging targets. Indeed, through eHealth4U, for the first time at a national level in the healthcare sector, entities from all main stakeholders that are needed for the development of a complete EHR platform have aligned their interests with the national strategies of the Ministry of Health and structure a very promising path for the future of healthcare in the island.
Within eHealth4U, UBITECH defines a data privacy framework to guarantee full compliance with existing legal and ethical rules on a European and national level. The data privacy framework will guarantee that data are processed in anonymous form wherever possible. Where anonymous processing is not possible for scientific reasons the data processing will be based on an appropriate legal basis, be it the patient’s explicit informed consent, be it an applicable legal rule in the national data privacy and protection regulation.
Moreover, UBITECH develops the eHealth4U Semantic EHR Model that encompasses a lightweight ontological model, which will consist of a set of core concepts and their relationships. It will be possible to further specialize these core concepts (through sub-concepts) or introduce new concepts, thus ensuring the extensibility and adaptability of the ontology to the needs of different scenarios of use. Finally, UBITECH implements a set of highly sophisticated security mechanisms to ensure IT security during the design and operation of clinical practice and research, a PKI-based security infrastructure, and a lightweight decision support system for improving patients’ EHR data safety.
