Goals

RAPIDE aims to develop, validate and demonstrate a portfolio of powerful tools that enable healthcare systems to build in robustness of decisions, the resilience of the healthcare professionals and patients and flexibility in the modalities of care delivery, thereby maintaining access to regular care during health emergencies. RAPIDE is a four-year project and will run until 2028.

There is a focus on two main challenges: 
1) identifying and predicting how much care and which care needs to be moved along the care chain
2) identifying and verifying effective, feasible and acceptable ways to make this reconfiguration of care a reality.

Consortium

RAPIDE involves an array of European stakeholders in the healthcare system, such as patients, GPs, clinicians, hospital managers, health ministries, pandemic management and public health agencies. In particular, this project will focus on four countries: Malta, Italy, Slovenia and the Netherlands. From each of these countries, stakeholders are already involved, such as the Universita Malta, Academia Italiana Cure Primarie, the Ljubljana Community Health Centre, Radboud University, University of Twente, HAN University of Applied Sciences and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). Besides these four specific countries, the European Forum of Primary Care, University of Galway and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology are involved in this project.

RIVM role

RIVM has an advisory role in most of RAPIDE's work packages. In WP4, RIVM has a leading role in identifying and analysing key stakeholders in the healthcare system in each of the four countries. In order to develop tools that are feasible and acceptable, it is imperative to engage the various stakeholders in the development. However, the first step is to identify these key stakeholders in healthcare and decision-making. Dr Doctor (Doctor) Mart Stein is the principal investigator, and Sophie Kemper and Xanne Mensinga are the primary researchers working on this project. An online survey will be set up and executed for the stakeholder analysis, followed by stakeholder workshops. The end result will be an overview of important stakeholders to engage in developing the tools to ensure more resilient health systems.

Funding

RAPIDE has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no 101136348.