Netherlands, Rotterdam – December 2 – Today marks the launch of the INDICATE project, a pioneering European initiative designed to enhance data access and sharing between intensive care units across Europe. INDICATE aims to advance patient-centered care and promoting ethically responsible data use and the development and implementation of trustworthy AI models. In the coming years, INDICATE will collaborate with organizations across the European healthcare sector to improve patient outcomes and foster a data-driven approach to healthcare.

At present, clinical decision-making and innovation in ICUs face significant challenges due to fragmented data, the lack of standardized data-sharing agreements, and insufficient secure infrastructure. These barriers became glaringly evident during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic when even basic questions, such as “How many patients requiring ventilatory support are admitted to ICUs?” were difficult to answer. This halts the development and implementation of AI models that are inclusive and diverse and have the possibility to improve patient targeted medicine. INDICATE seeks to overcome these challenges and ensure that critical healthcare data can be ethically and responsibly utilized.

INDICATE aims to address these problems by establishing a secure federated infrastructure for standardized Intensive Care data. Federated means that software to analyze data or train AI is taken to the data at the intensive care unit instead of taking the data to the people who do the analysis. This way data of patients will never leave the hospital and people who use the data never get to see the actual health data, but only the results they need. The federated approach is secure and promotes patient privacy by design. Importantly, INDICATE partners are spread across Europe to ensure that the available data reflects the diversity of patients in Europe in the short term, but also in the longer term when the network is meant to grow. This way INDICATE will form the foundation for training and operationalizing of AI model in intensive care units to support applications in personalized medicine, data comparison between ICUs, and disaster preparedness. For example, INDICATE will facilitate the development of an AI model to predict bacterial bloodstream infection in newborn infants will be developed to improve earlier recognition of this disease.

Dr. Michel van Genderen, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, coordinator of INDICATE:

“With INDICATE, we are building cross-border collaboration in healthcare, where data can truly make a difference in critical patient situations. We are setting a new standard in healthcare: secure data access and ethically responsible AI development and implementation as the norm. This paves the way for every ICU to benefit from the transformative power of AI and data-driven decision-making.”

Prof. Dr. Christian Jung, University Hospital of Düsseldorf, Germany, co-coordinator of INDICATE:

“By linking data from many Intensive Care units across Europe, we help doctors make better decisions and contribute to a more resilient European healthcare system.”

For more information: https://indicate-europe.eu