RAPIDE

During cross-border health emergencies, health and care services may be overwhelmed by high numbers of patients requiring unplanned care. Delays and backlogs in regular care, as a result of the stretched health care system, leave millions of patients with regular care needs unattended, resulting in disastrous healthcare outcomes. If poor healthcare outcomes across the population are to be avoided, healthcare systems must become more resilient and flexible and allow for rapid changes in the care delivery services. RAPIDE’s aim is to develop, validate and demonstrate a portfolio of powerful tools that enable healthcare systems to build in robustness of decisions, resilience of the health care professionals and patients and flexibility in the modalities of care delivery, thereby maintaining access to regular care during health emergencies. RAPIDE emphasises opportunities for optimising in-hospital care, but also for relocating care from hospitals to community and home environments without loss of care quality. Thus, the project focuses on two closely-linked challenges – 1: Identifying and predicting how much care, and which care, needs to be moved along the care chain; 2: Identifying and verifying effective, feasible and acceptable ways to make this reconfiguration of care a reality. This will be achieved by (a) resource modelling, which builds comprehensive foresight and forecasting solutions and links them to patient flows optimization, along the whole chain of care, (b) selecting and implementing the best available tools to deliver regular care in new ways. To ensure usability, acceptability and equitable real-world value, RAPIDE will be co-designed and co-validated with stakeholders, from patients, GPs, clinicians and hospital managers to health ministries, pandemic-management and public health agencies. A Table Top Exercise and extensive communication and dissemination will raise awareness of the project’s successes.