Digital platform for the delivery of therapies and healthcare services

This is a courtesy translation. The authoritative version of this disclosure is the Italian one.

Mia s.r.l. (hereinafter also referred to as MIA) received regional development funding under the Ricerca & Innova call for the creation of a digital platform delivering digitalised therapies and healthcare services to patients assisted remotely.

The purpose of the project is to develop a set of software components based on the Mia-Platform platform, enabling faster and more effective development and production of remote monitoring and care support solutions, in order to accelerate their clinical validation and commercial release.

We are at the beginning of a new phase in the evolution of therapy, in which digital technology is the enabler both for improving the patient-doctor relationship and for supporting the care pathway and delivering therapies to patients remotely.

Digitalising the patient care pathway and providing remote monitoring and assistance are particularly suited to the treatment of chronic diseases and to supporting patients who have difficulty reaching healthcare facilities.

Italy's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) itself provides for the adoption of new digital tools in order to take full advantage of the opportunities to improve healthcare provision.

Globally, the Digital Health market, generally defined as the set of technology products and services that allow healthcare and digital connectivity to converge, is expected to grow from 27.6 billion dollars in 2016 to 77.5 billion in 2022, with a CAGR of 18.8%.

The digital healthcare sector is undoubtedly strategic for Italy, one of the demographically oldest countries in the world. Demand for increasingly efficient and advanced technological tools is set to grow, in order to address a higher prevalence of chronic diseases and the occurrence of collective emergencies such as the Coronavirus epidemic. Despite this, the Italian market is characterised by vendors that, by relying on traditional technologies, do not make it possible to migrate towards the more effective and better performing solutions that cloud-native technology enables.

MIA was founded precisely to accelerate the digital transformation of companies, including those in healthcare and pharmaceuticals and manufacturers of medical devices, by providing a platform with a modern cloud architecture, based on tools and processes such as Microservices, APIs, Fast Data and DevOps.

MIA's platform (Mia-Platform) not only provides a tool to modernise the information systems of healthcare organisations, allowing them to build their own digital middleware, but also enables the rapid and efficient construction of digital services for doctors and patients.

It is this last capability that the project addresses, through experimental development of a version of the platform able to deliver services supporting remote therapies for patients.

The design and development of digital tools, and their use in clinical practice, must also take into account the possible issues of privacy management (given the considerable amount of sensitive data generated through these technologies) and cybersecurity. The purpose of the project is to develop a set of software components based on the Mia-Platform platform enabling faster and more effective development and production of remote monitoring and care support solutions, in order to accelerate their clinical validation and commercial release; the project is therefore structured along the following lines:

• development and testing of the software components and algorithms required to deliver the digital intervention;
• development and testing of components related to the secure handling of health data (such as audit log services);
• development and testing of a clinical dashboard for viewing the clinical and therapeutic characteristics of the patient assisted remotely;
• development and testing of software components for safety in therapy monitoring;
• development and testing of mechanisms (such as an API Gateway) for integration towards source data systems or towards systems that consume the data (for example the secure connection of data to healthcare systems such as the regional and national electronic health record, or to systems generating patient-related data, such as medical monitoring devices);
• development and testing of innovative tools for big data analysis (i.e. Snowflake);
• development and testing of a prototype of the components listed above, in order to reach the technical validation stage quickly and then move rapidly to field testing, first for usability and then for the pilot phases of clinical and commercial use.

The funding granted amounts to € 243.457,15, against a total availability of € 695.591,87.