The Epilepsy Communication Channel (EPICO) twinning aims at enhancing the quality of life of epileptic patients and enables healthcare professionals to have a wider know-how about their patients and the epilepsy disorder.
Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological diseases, affecting 0.7-1% of the world’s population. At least half of the epileptic patients need regular medical follow-ups with hospital neurology services or epilepsy units. In Murcia (Spain), waiting lists for regular doctor’s office appointments take an average of 6-9 months. At the same time, there is also a high number of unexpected (emergency) visits. The DHE twinning Epilepsy Communication Channel (EPICO) addresses this specific challenge by providing the digital solution from AICRUM IT SL, Spain (twinning originator) enabling communication between patients and doctors even remotely. The twinning focuses on a partial implementation of EPICO in a hospital in Greece via a special platform developed by Epioni and Syndesis Ltd (twinning adopters) to assess the potential for full implementation of the service in Greece.
The EPICO app developed by the twinning originator consists of a system tracing the whole process of epilepsy treatment defined by respective specialists. It allows direct information exchange between patients and doctors out of the hospital. It helps both patients to better manage their disease and thus feel more comfortable as well as doctors to have better access to their patients’ data and provide more precise treatment consequently. This way, the digital solution aims at reducing the number of epileptic crises and emergency consultations.
The EPICO twinning is currently ongoing. Its expected results are to implement a successful pilot of EPICO in Greece and to get feedback on the feasibility to deploy the solution in a higher number of hospitals in Greece through the existing applications that the doctors are using. Since no such projects are addressing the features of EPICO in Greece, there is a high potential for its further full adoption.
Currently, EPICO is being deployed in Greece where three doctors have demonstrated interest to experiment the tool with their patients with epilepsy. Read more about its progress.