ALAMEDA: Towards the Technology-Enabled Optimisation of Brain Healthcare Continuum

ALAMEDA is an international and multidisciplinary research project funded by the EU in the frame of the H2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme aiming to bridge the early diagnosis and treatment gap of brain diseases via smart, connected, proactive and evidence-based technological interventions. The present chapter illustrates the overall integrated, multidisciplinary and participatory approach to brain healthcare that ALAMEDA promotes by developing and testing the next generation AI-based healthcare support systems. Innovative technologies and models are meant to provide personalised disease monitoring as well as rehabilitation and treatment assessment for patients with Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and stroke (PMSS). This will support the design of outcome-driven interventions, allow that situations likely to aggravate can be predicted and boost the transition to value-based healthcare models.As the project is still ongoing, the chapter specifically focuses on a thorough overview of the respective care journeys, focusing specific attention on current healthcare service organisation and provision, their degree of multidisciplinarity and integration as well as digitalisation and personalisation. In addition, the authors dive into the three national contexts where the ALAMEDA solutions are being tested and discuss current workloads and procedures, the interconnectedness of services and providers at the local level and the efforts currently being made to give increasing weight to patients’ preferences in medical decision-making. From the insights obtained via desk search and direct consultation with the involved clinicians, the document points out the enabling and potentially hindering factors for the future development and deployment of the solutions locally. Last, the chapter describes the end users’ adopted engagement strategy and how the concepts and models from other research projects (such as MULTI-ACT) and well-established practices in medical settings (i.e. shared decision-making) are interpreted and adapted into the context of the innovative value-based healthcare digital transformation framework promoted by the ALAMEDA consortium.