Forray Alina-Ioana presented her vision for the CONNECT Project at the Techsyvania Satelite Event in Cluj-Napoca on 24th September. Here are presented the main points of her presentation.
“So, I will start with my experience during COVID times, when I had to work under the supervision of the main epidemiologist from the district health department from Cluj-Napoca. In September last year, we were only four persons doing the epidemiological surveys for infected patients.
Every day, each of us had to call 50+ patients who tested positive, and we had to tell them to stay at home and find other possible contacts to give all of the decisions for quarantine or isolation. We had to find out a lot of information for more than 300 cases per day.
The only problem was that all the information from the people from Cluj county was in a single database in google sheets. There were more than 20 thousand entries, and as you can imagine, that was the most messed up idea ever. I mean a lot of lag, many unwanted changes, nothing customizable, just a mess for the team from the health district.
I know that there are people, that want to help the health department to improve the system. If they had the community needed. I tried to bring more students to the department to survey the infected cases and gain experience, but no luck; they did not decide to do so for months.
So, as a public health resident physician, I needed to vent about how horrible the lack of healthcare innovation is during COVID times. And my team proposed a solution to the Erasmus National Agency that was funded. The answer is educational resources for students from multiple backgrounds to understand the issues concerning the rapidly developing eHealth ecosystem.
I’m not a tech person, but I work in the academic and educational sectors. I’ve seen the lack of experience of people from the healthcare system regarding eHealth solutions.
And I live in Cluj. I have a lot of friends that work in tech. They can’t comprehend the workflow of the health professionals or the data required in our healthcare sector for improving quality, the assurance system and evaluation of services.
We need to create a connected healthcare system, especially in Cluj, where the University of Medicine ranks in the top worldwide and where the Technical University and Babes-Bolyai University form one of the most capable minds related to IT development from Eastern Europe.
It’s easy to go to battle with really great Partners, like the University of Porto, the most fun University in the Innovation Department, and two NGOs (one working in the health tech startup development and one in the newest eLearning methods)
And we will try to create a complete experience of combining eLearning, long term mentorship and an onsite Study Programme.
We need to design, develop and disseminate a new and updated training framework, courses, and an online tool about eHealth to engage students and enable them to create solutions that could be further developed as startups. So, we need to give them access to skills, mentors and other tools through our educational program.
We also need to think about this issue from a cross-sectoral angle and see what students from the IT and Health sectors could learn from each other and how their collaboration could create innovative solutions. We have to develop new and updated courses related to eHealth, and we involved experts from partner countries to build them. And we are in the process of finishing the learning modules.
The second objective is to organize the intensive study program in Romania. We will recruit students from Romania and Portugal from the pool of students enrolled in our universities’ healthcare and IT educational programs. This Intensive Study Program will be in the format of a Bootcamp, and students will design and present innovative eHealth solutions.
Also, the final objective is to create an online network or a social collaboration platform. In this community, we invite key actors from academia, industry, and NGOs to exchange best practices, collaborate with students, and post opportunities to those interested in eHealth innovation across Europe.
We want to create a community of practice for students because they need to learn more about digital health, the startup health tech environment, telemedicine, e-professionalism, social media in health, mHealth, eLearning and many more themes.
The community word is essential here because this is really missed during the COVID pandemic.
We already have great partners and financing from the European Commission, but we also want to include experienced mentors, industry links, and guides in the process in this community.
We already have over two hundred contacts from Europe that will play a significant role in creating a loop to integrate and care for the future developed workforce and community. I want to be clear about something. I’ve worked with many students, and not that long ago, I was a student as well, and I know that students are happy to be involved in a place of shared values and where the organization implies a community. We think about the future and are enthusiastic about participating in a better and safer method of interacting with the future of healthcare development.
This place will be covered by us, but this is why we want to collaborate with external startups, clusters and businesses that could create the gamification process more fun in the online and offline community.
For example, creating challenges that look like real-life scenarios at the workplace, participating in hackathons, answering community members to questions like on Reddit or ResearchGate. We anticipate that the community will create its own discussion subjects and areas of further development.
The “eHealth Community of Practice” online platform will be available for at least three years after the project completion period constituting a transnational network of members from academia, industry, and healthcare and as a mentorship platform for future health innovators.
We want you to know that we are ready to give and disseminate for free some great tools to students, like:
1. the learning modules that were created with the help of experts,
2. an interactive resource that includes multiple media formats and a community
We want to develop the startup health tech environment, we want the future workforce to be comfortable at the workspace when it comes to innovation in healthcare, and we want them to find a place for collaboration within the sectors.
If you want to be part of the community as a student, mentor or industry contact, please create an account on connect.publichealth.ro to keep you posted on our project.”
