The ESCAPE project is moving closer to finalising its software platform, designed to support a clinical study focused on delivering patient-centred, biopsychosocial, blended collaborative care (BCC) for multimorbid elderly patients. At the heart of this effort is the Clinician Dashboard (CD)—a digital tool developed in close collaboration with clinical teams to support and streamline the delivery of care across nine international trial sites.
Designed with Clinicians, for Clinicians
The Clinician Dashboard serves as a central application that brings together various digital tools into a single, user-friendly interface. It gives care managers and clinicians a real-time overview of patient status and includes a wizard-like feature that guides users through structured patient assessments and the collection of reported outcomes. This ensures a consistent and comprehensive care management process.
An agile software development process was employed, involving coordination within the development team and frequent meetings with the clinical team. To date, over 260 issues, requests, and adaptations have been addressed. The major focus has been on improving the user interface to facilitate the work of care managers and performing essential maintenance and security updates to ensure the smooth operation of the platform.
A Robust System Architecture
The system architecture of the platform builds upon existing components of the imergo® Integrated Care Platform and is organized into multiple layers:
- Security Layer: Manages user authentication and access control through a Single Sign-On (SSO) system with advanced role and attribute-based permissions. Firewall services protect against unauthorised access.
- Application Layer: Includes the Clinician Dashboard and a Localisation Dashboard, allowing trial centres in different countries to adapt the user interface language to local needs.
- Service Layer: Facilitates communication between platform components via tools like a Message Broker, Data Streaming Service, Communication Server, Schedule/Monitor component, Email Relay Service, Service Orchestrator, and an ETL Connector, which imports pseudonymised data from hospital systems.
- Knowledge Layer: Hosts a Terminology Server containing clinical standards and repositories of questionnaires, interventions, clinical guidelines, and regulations.
- Persistence Layer: Manages data storage and retrieval, ensuring secure, efficient handling of all patient-related information.
Clinician Dashboard in Action
Significant enhancements have been made to the user interface to support care managers in their day-to-day tasks. The landing page features a streamlined navigation bar, dashboard summaries, and a patients' table that displays key patient data at a glance.
The Patient Overview page offers a deep dive into individual cases, including monitoring data, comorbidities, preferences, lab results, medication lists, and more. A key feature is step-by-step interface, which guides care managers through patient encounters step-by-step, ensuring structured data collection, clinical completeness, and high-quality documentation.
Looking Ahead
Looking forward, the project's focus will shift to maintaining, updating, and securely operating the platform, along with supplying the collected data to the clinical team for analysis. The ultimate goal is to improve care for multimorbid elderly patients through a collaborative and patient-centred approach, leveraging the robust and secure platform developed by the ESCAPE project. Stay tuned for more updates on this exciting technology!
