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RES-Q+ – Comprehensive solution of healthcare improvement based on the global Registry of Stroke Care Quality
March 2023
Using digitisation and artificial intelligence to revolutionise healthcare
RES-Q+ is a new project, funded by the European Commission Horizon Europe programme, which will use artificial intelligence in the fight against stroke in Europe.
It will improve the quality of care for stroke patients, save patients’ lives, reduce healthcare costs and increase the economic and social benefit to stroke survivors.
This will be done by:
- creating a fully automated tool for obtaining and processing data
- evaluating data and providing feedback to care providers through artificial intelligence-based virtual assistants that can target problem areas
- creating virtual assistants for stroke patients that will monitor their condition.
Building on the RES-Q (Registry of Stroke Care Quality)
The RES-Q+ project will build on the Registry of Stroke Care Quality (RES-Q Global), originally an initiative of the European Stroke Organisation under the ESO EAST Program (Enhancing and Accelerating Stroke Treatment). The Registry is supported by the European Stroke Organisation, a pan-European NGO comprised of stroke researchers and physicians, national and regional stroke societies and lay organisations. Furthermore RES-Q also partners with World Stroke Organisation (WSO), American Heart Association/ American Stroke Association (AHA/ ASA), Angels Initiative and other stakeholders RES-Q is currently used in 92 countries by > 2100 sites with 580,000+ patient’s data, making it one of the largest quality registry in the world.
The data is used by hospitals to improve the stroke care they deliver. It is also used by, for example, by Ministries of Health, to help inform decisions about new investment in healthcare.
How will artificial intelligence help doctors and stroke survivors?
‘The RES-Q+ project will bring several new products that will make the doctors´ work easier, improve acute stroke care and improve the lives of patients after stroke. Now, doctors or nurses enter data about the care provided into the system manually, and it costs time. The project will offer a solution where data will be extracted automatically from hospital systems into the registry without any manual work. The virtual assistant would then analyse the data and tell the doctor, nurse or even the hospital director in which parameters the care needs to be improved.’
Principal Investigator, Robert Mikulik
‘Directly monitoring stroke survivors through a virtual assistant will keep track of their condition after hospital discharge, enabling check-ups, follow-up treatment and referrals to be more effective and tailored to their needs. We are very hopeful that this technology will help to improve the quality of life for millions of people living with stroke in Europe in the near future.’
Arlene Wilkie, Director General, Stroke Alliance for Europe
In addition:
- RES-Q+ is expected to directly impact stroke healthcare for people in around half of the European countries
- RES-Q+ will cover more than 1,200 active hospitals in Europe by 2025 providing annual quality monitoring for more than 142,000 stroke survivors. By 2030, this is expected to increase to 220,000 stroke survivors in 1,900 hospitals
- Models that predict a patient’s prognosis will be developed and will predict any anomalies. Diagnostic models will be available for medical use worldwide, by any user of the RES-Q+ system, (100 countries by 2028)
- A legal environment will be created allowing the platform to share data on the health of stroke survivors, usable not only for scientific purposes, but also for doctors in clinical practice and for the patients themselves
- The project will also contribute to the unification of hospitalisation information and the creation of one standardised discharge report format in the EU in the field of stroke care
- RES-Q+ will be an open platform and will have the potential to be used for other diseases in the future. Primarily in fields that are closely related to stroke, such as rehabilitation, but it could also be used in vascular surgery, neurosurgery and other fields.
Delivery
RES-Q+ (Comprehensive solution for improving healthcare using a global register of stroke care quality) will be delivered by a consortium of 21 partners*, which includes the top European institutions in the relevant fields, are participating in the project. It will be coordinated and led by the Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the Czech Republic (IHIS). The head of the project is a researcher and neurologist Robert Mikulik from the Czech Republic, and Co-leader is Hendrik Knoche, a human-computer interaction expert from Aalborg University, Denmark.
The consortium has a grant of €7.7 million from the European Commission’s HORIZON EUROPE research and innovation support programme (Project Number 101057603). RES-Q+ was ranked 2nd out of 47 European projects in the expert evaluation and is described as an unprecedented.
The funding is for four years until October 2026.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Health and Digital Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them
*RES-Q+ partners
- Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the Czech Republic
- Aalborg University, Denmark
- Charles University, Czechia
- Technical University Dublin, Ireland
- ALANA, Ireland
- Ontotext, Bulgaria
- University of Murcia, Spain
- Timelex, Belgium
- Chino.io, Italy
- Masaryk University, Czechia
- Vall d’Hebron Institute of Research, Spain
- Boehringer Ingelheim, Germany
- World Stroke Organisation, Switzerland
- Stroke Alliance for Europe, Belgium
- National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
- Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, Poland
- University Hospital of Bucharest, Romania
- Multiprofile Hospital for Active Treatment in Neurology and Psychiatry, Bulgaria
- Health Management Institute, Czechia
- University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
- International Clinical Research Center at St. Anne’s University Hospital Brno, Czechia
