A New Interactive Tool to Visualize and Analyze COVID-19 Data: The PERISCOPE Atlas.

Since the start of the 21st century, the world has not confronted a more serious threat to global public health than the COVID-19 pandemic. While governments initially took radical actions in response to the pandemic to avoid catastrophic collapse of their health care systems, government policies have also had numerous knock-on socioeconomic, political, behavioral and economic effects. Researchers, thus, have a unique opportunity to forward our collective understanding of the modern world and to respond to the emergency situation in a way that optimizes resources and maximizes results. The PERISCOPE project, funded by the European Commission, brings together a large number of research institutions to collect data and carry out research to understand all the impacts of the pandemic, and create predictive models that can be used to optimize intervention strategies and better face possible future health emergencies. One of the main tangible outcomes of this project is the PERISCOPE Atlas: an interactive tool that allows to visualize and analyze COVID-19-related health, economic and sociopolitical data, featuring a WebGIS and several dashboards. This paper describes the first release of the Atlas, listing the data sources used, the main functionalities and the future development.

From generic pathways to ICT-supported horizontally integrated care: the SmartCare approach and convergence with future Internet assembly.

Successful service integration in policy and practice requires both technology innovation and service process innovation being pursued and implemented at the same time. The SmartCare project (partially EC-funded under CIP ICT PSP Program) aims to achieve this through development, piloting and evaluation of ICT-based services, horizontally integrating health and social care in ten pilot regions, including Kraljevo region in Serbia. The project has identified and adopted two generic highest-level common thematic pathways in joint consolidation phase - integrated support for long-term care and integrated support after hospital discharge. A common set of standard functional specifications for an open ICT platform enabling the delivery of integrated care is being defined, around the challenges of data sharing, coordination and communication in these two formalized pathways. Implementation and system integration on technology and architecture level are to be based on open standards, multivendor interoperability, and leveraging on the current evolving open specification technology foundations developed in relevant projects across the European Research Area.