From: "Patrick SCHOULLER" 
Subject: Projet belge de e-Inclusion, suite du projet IST HUMAN,
  cherche des partenaires pour un projet ETEN

Dear all, 
Let me first introduce myself. I am the Managing Director of Health
Information
Management SA a Belgian consultancy specialised in the eHealth and eInclusion
sectors. Although the Company has only existed for 7 years, I have been active
in the design and management of European projects for the last 10 years,
and my
colleagues and I have masterminded successful proposals funded under no less
than 5 different EU Programmes. 
Having said that, in recent years we have concentrated on the eTEN Programme
because of its market orientation which is closer to our interests. This
concentration has been rewarded by a particularly high success rate with 6
proposals funded out of a total of 10 that we have submitted in the last 3
years. This is not of course a guarantee of success for future proposals
but it
is certainly a good pedigree! 
We have decided to submit a new proposal in response to the current Call for
Proposals in the area of integrated care for prison inmates which is a
particularly hot subject in several EU countries. The proposal is based on the
results of an IST project, HUMAN, which has been co-ordinated by our sister
company Synapsis. You will find here under a summary of the proposal with the
current structure of the Consortium. 
As you see, the Consortium is rather complete but we think that we can still
accommodate a few more partners from central or Northern Europe to complete
the
geographical scope of the Market Validation. 
Ideally we need one prison and one hospital which are already working together
and, possibly, a local system integrator for integration of the HUMAN solution
with the existing IT environment of the partners. 
For a question of sheer size of the Consortium, we cannot accommodate more
than
one extra country, so the first country which comes forward with a credible
set
of partners, will be accepted into the Consortium. 
We will take care of the redaction of the proposal and we will ask the various
partners very little contribution apart from their administrative data and
organisation profile. We ask however all partners to give a small financial
contribution towards the cost of preparing the proposal that, I can
promise, is
not trivial if we want to have a winning proposal. This contribution is fixed
at 1.500 € for public organisations and 3.000 € for private ones. 
If you think that you have in your countries organisation corresponding to the
profiles mentioned above and in the attached proposal summary, please come
forward ASAP. 
I look forward to hearing from you. 
Best regards, 
Marco d'Angelantonio 
________________________
Marco d'Angelantonio 
HIM S.A. 
Avenue de l'Yser, 11 
1040 Bruxelles 
Belgium
e-mail: mdange@attglobal.net
Phone : +32-475-34 11 38
FAX : +32-2-735 12 40


eHUMAN
eTEN Health throUgh TeleMAtics for iNmates Shifting

Idea for an eTEN proposal to be submitted under the Call 2004/1
Foreword
Prison inmates are a group of citizens particularly discriminated in terms of
timely access to quality healthcare. This is not of course deliberate but
it is
simply a consequence of the restrictions to freedom of movement that the
indispensable security framework imposes within a prison.
Most penitentiaries in Europe have their own medical team composed of medical
doctors, nurses and paramedics but for economical and practical reasons the
members of the team cannot cover all the possible branches of medicine.
Moreover there is very limited exchange of personnel between the resident
medical team, who is usually composed of people that have chosen to practice
their profession in a prison, and the rest of the medical community that
practices in the world outside the prison’s walls. This leads to rapid
obsolescence of the medical knowledge among the members of the medical team
who
do not have easy access to the Continuous Professional Development (CPD)
schemes which are in place in most European countries but which have not been
designed having in mind the specific requirements and the heavy constraints of
this specific subset of heath professionals and workers.
Even the contact between the members of the resident medical team and other
health professionals is not so frequent because, with few exceptions, inmates
requiring care which cannot be delivered inside the prisons are taken to a
normal hospital but are not usually accompanied by the medical staff of the
prison. This means that even these opportunities for the prison medical staff
to interact with their colleagues are normally wasted and the four walls of
the
prison end up creating a ghetto not only for the prisoners, who have a
sentence
to purge, but also for the medical staff who provides healthcare to them.
The pernicious consequences of this situation are multiple:   
·       demotivation of the resident medical staff; 
·       difficulties in recruiting medical and paramedical personnel for
prisons; 
·       progressive worsening of the care provided to the inmates;  
·       high costs to the community to provide healthcare to inmates without
achieving an acceptable level of quality;   
·       etc. 
While providing normal care is already a problem in itself, health
emergencies,
especially if they are not detected at their insurgence, have more often a
fatal outcome in a prison that in the world outside because of the sheer time
to take an inmate out of the prison without endangering the security of an
entire prison.
Having said so, simulation of diseases is common practice among inmates and
even the most experienced practitioner can be misled by an inmate faking a
crisis unless he/she is presented at the time of taking a decision with all
the
elements which can help him/her to distinguish between truth and untruth.
Focus of the proposal
eHUMAN capitalises upon the outcome of the IST HUMAN project which has
finished
in August 2004 and has developed and successfully validated a comprehensive
technical platform that support the prison’s medical team in all the
aspects of
their activity from the early detection of emergencies (remote monitoring of
inmates through a “domotic cell”), to the Decision Support System which helps
medical staff to assemble relevant information concerning a specific inmate
from various sources and interpret it, to second opinion or tele-consultation
services which allow the resident staff to interact with physicians outside
the
hospital. The Continuous Professional Development aspects have not been
forgotten of course and are addressed through e-learning techniques and
virtual
class facilities which allow the resident medical staff to feel again part
of a
larger professional community.
The proposal aims to market validate a business model whose value chain
comprises six different types of players:   
·       Penitentiaries and Penitentiary Authorities. They have responsibility
for the delivery of care to inmates and represent the main users and the
natural buyers of the services that eHUMAN intends to deploy;  
·       Inmates. They will be recruited by the Penitentiary Authorities in the
participating penitentiaries. They will of course participate in the trials on
a purely voluntary basis and will be asked to give their explicit consent to
confirm their willingness to participate. The IST phase of HUMAN has
demonstrated that recruitment of inmates does not constitute a problem and
that
they are willing to be enrolled especially if the know that they suffer from
serious diseases. The latter and inmates in general are the main beneficiaries
of the eHUMAN services   
·       Local Health Authorities and Hospitals. They are the providers of
healthcare services to the penitentiaries falling under their responsibility
and complement the medical expertise of the resident medical team. They are
also in some cases responsible for the CPD of the resident medical staff;  
·       Solution Providers. They supply the building blocks of the solutions
which might need adaptation/integration into the specific environments of the
participating hospitals/penitentiaries;
·       Service Providers. They run the telemedicine networks linking the
hospitals to the reference hospitals and the application and e-learning
infrastructure;
·       Business Consultants. They develop the business case and prepare the
business plan, capitalising on their vast experience in the healthcare market
throughout Europe.
The final goal of eHUMAN is therefore to validate, through the implementation
of pilot experiences in several European countries, the social, medical and
economic viability of this business model. In addition, being eHUMAN a modular
system composed by several sub-systems (domotic cell, DSS, second opinion and
tele-consultation, e-learning system) which can be deployed independently from
one another, the market validation has also to determine if it is advisable to
deploy all or only part of them depending on their individual cost/benefit
ratio.
Economic impact of eHUMAN
eHUMAN promises to substantially reduce the cost of providing quality
healthcare to inmates especially when the seriousness of the disease requires
the transfer of an inmate to an external hospital. This is an operation that
necessitates the deployment of a large number of agents and vehicles and that,
however thorough are the security measures put in place, always represents a
temporary lowering of the security level.
Present composition of the Consortium (partners in grey are not confirmed yet)
Penitentiaries and Penitentiary Authorities   
·       Casa Circondariale Palermo Pagliarelli (I) 
·       Casa Circondariale di Treviso (I) 
·       Directorate General of Prison and Rehabilitation Services (Regional
Government of Catalonia) (E) 
·       Penitentiary D  
Local Health Authorities and Hospitals   
·       Gastrological Hospital Department, University of Palermo (Italy) 
·       U.L.S.S. di Treviso (I) 
·       Hospital General de Terrazza Catalonia (E) 
·       Hospital D  
Solution Providers   
·       SYNAPSIS S.r.l. (I) 
Service Providers   
·       TMR (I) 
·       Service Provider B  
Business Consultants   
·       Health Information Management sa (B)  

Patrick SCHOULLER
Ministère de l'Economie des Finances et de l'Industrie
Direction Générale des Entreprises - STSI
Représentant national aux comités des programmes IST, E-TEN, E-CONTENT,
SIAP, MODINIS, IDABC
Point de contact national E-TEN et SIAP