Project e-CREAM

The CoViD-19 pandemic has demonstrated the crucial importance of high-quality Emergency Departments (EDs) in ensuring the best care to patients. Indeed, the first clinical evaluation in the ED is essential to decide on appropriate treatments and hospitalisation. Likewise, the first treatments provided in the ED are often essential to guarantee the best possible outcome. 

This poses the challenge of continuously assessing and improving the clinical and organisational performance of single EDs, even independently from CoViD-19, based on validated criteria. The most convincing way to achieve this is through clinical and quality-of-care assessment research. Unfortunately, to date, the possibility of doing research in emergency medicine has clashed with sustainability issues. The vast number of patients visiting an ED (60-90.000 patients access a medium-size ED per year) and staff shortages that chronically afflict these departments make ad hoc data collections unattainable. Therefore, clinical research in emergency medicine has been mostly confined to large academic centres, which can count on research-dedicated organisations and teams. 

Aims of the e-CREAM: 1) to develop new technical solutions to extract reliable clinical information from structured and unstructured data contained in different electronic patient files; 2) to FAIRify (i.e. making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable) the established databases for clinicians, researchers, health policymakers and citizens while respecting the European and national legislations; 3) to pilot the exploitation of the established databases in two relevant use cases: i) assessment of ED propensity to hospitalise a patient, and ii) development of a dashboard to be used by citizens and policymakers to improve the quality of care in ED.