PROJECT TITLE

COVID-X: COVID eXponential Programme

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

COVID-X will deliver a turnkey methodology to bridge the collaboration divide between eHealth solution providers -with emphasis on lean startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)-, and the healthcare professional system. The purpose is to boost an end-to-end agile validation programme of cutting-edge technology in three real-world clinical scenarios, located in hotspots of the pandemic: Italy, Spain and Sweden.

The project will fast-track value streams between the two poles under consideration:
1) attract, invest and empower a community of European eHealth SMEs –the beneficiaries of an acceleration program, selected by open calls- that will provide market-ready data-driven solutions, already certified with -or close to receive- the CE marking;
2) actively involve some of the most relevant hospitals of Europe that have the resources, critical mass and ambition to scale-up their capabilities in the COVID-19 response.

They will be complementing long-term new advances in vaccines and medical treatments with fast uptake of nextgeneration technology.

The project will invest dedicated  efforts to enforce data privacy and security, ethical compliance and user acceptance.

8BELLS ROLE

8BELLS contributes as leader to T2.1 – Sandbox Design and Population. This task deals with sandbox design and data extraction, transforming and loading from the hospitals, as well as the crawling and pre-processing of public relevant datasets aiming at creating a fully-accessible reference datalake. For this purpose, COVID-X will provide a fast easy-to-access set of dataloaders (using Natural Language Processing and Computer vision modules developed by the partners in previous projects), acting as foundations of the top services. The dataloaders are compatible existing standards (i.e. FHIR HL7) and will enable comparable information, while permitting models training via federated Learning.

Also 8BELLS will participate in the deployment of Sandbox Tools, Testing and Interoperability. This task oversees the integration and testing, following a CI/CD approach, as well as setup, cloud-based deployment and operation of the sandbox, permitting external access via secure Application Programming Interfaces, and distributed streaming cues. The sandbox will employ extended virtualisation technologies to permit fast-orchestration and security by design. Additionally, this task will apply security mechanisms and policy rules to support the heterogeneous data exchange of information while preserving integrity and interaction of services/applications. Finally, this task will provide transversal services for the community such as administration (for policies adjustment), data analytics, intuitive information visualization and related Business Intelligence and recommendation tools to support third parties.