€1.8m for secure AI in emergency pediatric care

Tune Insight to lead a 1.8 million Euro project for privacy-preserving machine learning on Electronic Health Records (EHR) in pediatric emergency care across Italian and Swiss hospitals. 

Along with Italian and Swiss hospitals from the pediatric emergency research network (PERN), including Insel Gruppe Spital in Bern, Switzerland, and University Hospital of Padova, Italy, plus Italian SME DataRiver, Tune Insight was awarded a 1.8 million euro Eurostars project to securely connect emergency pediatric departments to improve health outcomes of the vulnerable population of acutely ill and injured children across countries and continents. 

With the project, Tune Insight and its partners will overcome the lack of large, international, collaborative data pipelines from complex health data. We will tackle this issue through the development, deployment, and validation of a privacy-preserving federated learning platform for patient-centered research in pediatric emergency medicine. It will combine state-of-the-art interoperability techniques to address the challenges inherent to the use of routine electronic medical data, and cutting-edge privacy-preserving technologies to ensure compliance with international data protection regulations, thus developing a robust blueprint for its use in other collaborative clinical research applications.

Dr. Silvia Bressan (University of Padova, Italy), PERN Chair: “We are very excited to collaborate with Tune Insight in this project. Their outstanding work with Swiss hospitals showed that their secure software solution opens a new era for secure data collaborations in healthcare. We are looking forward to applying it to pediatric emergency care across hospitals in different jurisdictions, to advance quality of care for children through advanced analytics and machine learning”. 

Once deployed with initial partner hospitals, the solution is meant to be extended to the global Pediatric Emergency Research Network (PERN, https://pern-global.com/) that has access to data from over 2 million pediatric emergency presentations per year, to over 100 hospitals, in four of the six World Health Organization (WHO) regions.

This project is funded by the Eurostars program.