05 Jan Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza – Who is who in Pharaon

Posted at 12:34h in News by

Who we are

The Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza (Home for the Relief of Suffering) Research Hospital, inaugurated on May 5th 1956, is considered one of the best reference hospitals in Central and Southern Italy. On the basis of its Founder’s instructions, Saint Pio from Pietrelcina, the mission of the Hospital is to offer high quality and patient-centred care and assistance as well as to perform scientific research and provide continuing education for the healthcare staff. In 1991, the Casa Sollievo Hospital was recognized an Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico (Research Hospital) by the Italian Ministry of Health. Since then, the Hospital has carried out research and clinical activities in collaboration with the most important Italian and international research centres, particularly in the fields of Genetics, Innovative Therapeutics and Regenerative Medicine. With more than 500 hospital beds and 60,000 yearly admissions, the Casa Sollievo Hospital represents a concrete response to the needs of the patients from the Apulia Region, where the hospital is located, and other regions. On March 18th 2020, the Hospital entered the Apulian network of Covid-19 emergency hospitals. Since then, the hospital has managed a significant number of patients infected with COVID-19, making first aid services, beds and ICUs available.

The role of the Casa Sollievo Hospital in Pharaon

The main task of the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza Research Hospital in the Pharaon project is to support the technical partners of the project with the necessary know-how about the needs, the expectations and the abilities of older persons with different levels of cognitive and functional impairment. The aim is to develop functional solutions to promote healthy and active ageing, improving at the same time the quality of life of older people and their formal and informal caregivers. The experience gained by the Hospital in other technology based projects will help to better define the characteristics of the systems that will be developed in a way that they can be easily accepted and used by users, so that a high level of compliance can be achieved with patients when using these systems. The extensive expertise of the Geriatric Unit of the Casa Sollievo Hospital in specific fields, such as the Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA), the evaluation and the management of older people with and without cognitive impairment, is an added value to the project. Specifically, the multidisciplinary team of the hospital will facilitate the design process of the modules of the platform, so that they can be able to dynamically detect changes to the patient’s health status through a multidimensional approach. Moreover, given the wide catchment area of the hospital, the recruitment of the patients to involve in the testing and validation phases will be greatly facilitated. Furthermore, the hospital will collaborate in the dissemination of the scientific results that will be obtained as the projects develops.

Other projects and relevant expertise

The Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza Research Hospital is currently involved in two other research projects funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 program, in the areas of Assistive Robotics and Smart & Healthy Living:

  1. GATEKEEPER: a large-scale pilot project for the creation of an open and secure European platform where ideas, technologies, user needs and processes can be exchanged with the aim to promote healthier lifestyles for the ageing population. It will involve approx. 35,000 older patients; the partnership includes public and private regional authorities, associations, universities, research centres and companies from six EU member states.
  2. BD4QoL: a project on the use of Big Data and intelligent tools aiming at improving the Quality of Life of post-surgical head and neck cancer patients.

Other relevant projects on Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA) in which the hospital is involved are the following: SI-Robotics (SocIal ROBOtics for active and healthy ageing, a PON project funded by the Italian Ministry for the Education, University and Reseach and carried out in collaboration with various companies, Italian universities and research centres for the creation of social robots to be used in the hospital and domestic settings, aiming at promoting an active and healthy ageing), ACCRA (Agile CoCreation of Robots for Ageing, H2020 funded, completed in November 2020), MARIO (Managing active and healthy ageing with use of caring service robots, H2020 funded, completed in 2017), ALTRUISM (Alzheimer patient’s home by a rehabilitation- based Virtual Personal Trainer Unique Information System Monitoring, funded by the Apulia Region), MSLAB (Multisensorial Lab, funded by the Apulia Region), CONTACT (Integrated management platform of the care pathway of chronic patients affected by Multiple Sclerosis, funded by the Apulia Region and concluded in October 2020).

The Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza Research Hospital also has long experience in Data Privacy and Data Protection and, in particular, in meeting the requirements to make a healthcare organization GDPR compliant.

You can also read the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza partner profile in Italian (click here)