Information Technologies in Medicine (MedIT)
MedIT Cluster – Informacinių technologijų medicinoje asociacija

Name & description

Our cluster organization is part of the Lithuanian cluster program

In many countries, clusters promote economic growth and employment. Clusters attract new technologies, qualified personnel, and investment in research. Co-operation between groups of enterprises, which allows reducing the cost of acquiring knowledge or technologies, creates more learning opportunities, allows the allocation of risk and costs of research and applied activities, encourages flexibility, and also helps to reduce the time of leading new products or processes to the market is becoming an increasingly important condition of succeeding in competition.

At present time, 46 cluster initiatives are identified in Lithuania. Some of them are still at the embryonic stage or are presented only by groups of enterprises whose gathering was sparked by the desire to take advantage of the EU structural funds. Only a quarter of the identified clusters are being formed naturally, in developing new products or services through long-term co-operation and seeking to gain a bigger market share, thus enhancing the overall competitive ability of the cluster enterprises.

The following can be classified as naturally formed clusters: Vilnius Cinematography Cluster, Laser and Engineering Technologies Cluster, E-services Cluster, Photovoltaic Technology Cluster, MONAK2 Modern Home Creation Cluster, Odontology Innovations Cluster, ABBI Cluster, Plastics and New Materials Cluster, iVita Wellness Cluster, and ELIT Cluster. The foundation for these cluster formations – long-term mutual co-operation in the development of new products or services and the opportunity to seize a bigger market share owing to joint effort, thus increasing the overall competitive ability of the cluster enterprises.

SHIRE

Europe’s healthcare system is currently still very much focused on ‘curing’ rather than ‘preventing’. This approach is not appropriate for the management off long term conditions for older citizens. Existing preventative health measures are generally still very much ad-hoc, directed at one specific life-style issue or one specific health risk, and/or national or regional in focus. Integrated preventative health systems are currently not possible because: (i) such approaches have rarely been attempted; (ii) sensor systems that can monitor personal health and life-style status are lacking; (iii) personal feedback and intervention systems are either not existing or rarely used.

SHIRE Consortium partners: University Medical Center Groningen (coordinator, NL), University of Ulster (UK), University of Groningen (NL), Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (LT), University De La Iglesia De Deusto (ES), Trinity College Dublin (IE), and several industries: IT in Medicine cluster (LT), Latvian IT cluster (LV), CGI Netherlands, Virtech (BG), Redburn Solutions (UK) and Siemens AG (DE).

Heal-IT

The healthcare and pharmaceutical sector is one of the most important for Europe. In spite of being highly regulated and characterized by a high capital consumption/high failure risk, it is incorporating significant game-changing ICT innovations such as artificial intelligence, IoT, robotics. Also, Precision Medicine is arising as a new paradigm converging Evidence Based and Personalized Medicine, facing specific challenges for IT adoption: interoperability, data privacy and security, regulations and scarcity of substantial clinical validation data, and lack of adoption readiness of the healthcare system. Enabling SME’s to integrate emerging IT and overcoming development challenges while involving end users, practitioners and society will be instrumental for Europe to lead in Precision Medicine Innovation along its value chain, from conception to market. HEAL-IT aims to build a framework for IT–healthcare joint innovation, overcoming hurdles and development pitfalls found by SMEs and key agents in the highly specialized/high risk healthcare industrial sector. Our goal is to catalyse the adoption of new IT along the healthcare value chain in Europe, through facilitating start-ups, the most efficient vehicle to deliver innovation, define new products and services and unfold more efficient development pathways to reach the clinical practice and the market. HEAL-IT brings together cluster facilitators, life sciences and IT agencies, research institutes/hospitals and industry associations to build a multidisciplinary, synergistic consortium with a vast geographical coverage. This will result in a larger impact across 8 participating countries, leaving a deep technology integration footprint and provoking mimicking processes over the European Innovation Ecosystem. Ultimately, HEAL-IT will pave the way for improving access of citizens to innovation whilst providing a framework for the development of new industrial value chains regarding technology integration in healthcare

HEAL-IT Consortium partners:: BIOCAT LA FUNDACIO BIOREGIO DE CATALUNYA Spain; EURASANTE France; AGENCE BRUXELLOISE POUR L'ACCOMPAGNEMENT DE L'ENTREPRISE Belgium; BIOM BIOTECH CLUSTER DEVELOPMENT GMBH Germany; NV BRABANTSE ONTWIKKELINGS MAATSCHAPPIJ HOLDING BV Netherlands; TURKU SCIENCE PARK OY AB Finland; CONSIGLIO NAZIONALE DELLE RICERCHE Italy; Information Technology in Medicine association Lithuania; WEDO PROJECT INTELLIGENCE MADE EASY SL Spain.