About the project
Establishment of pandemic management and pandemic preparedness with the respective university hospitals as supra-maximal care providers as part of regional healthcare networks in cooperation and coordination with the institutions responsible for pandemic management.
Optimised regional and federal pandemic management, taking into account the partly country-specific complex network of the healthcare system.
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The restrictions on public life, including a lockdown to slow down the spread of infection and the risk of overburdening the healthcare system and its employees, represent serious disruptions to our familiar way of life that not only affect our everyday lives, but also jeopardise the lives of our fellow citizens in all dimensions (health and existential). It was therefore necessary to test the efficiency of measures developed in close coordination and to develop new approaches and implement them quickly and in a coordinated manner. The resulting nationally standardised and regionally adaptable pandemic management depends on the continuous support and knowledge of all university hospitals and pandemic-relevant research institutions in Germany, as well as on the continuous exchange with the other projects funded by the NUM. Only through close cooperation between all health policy stakeholders in a concerted effort involving society as a whole can an effective fight against the COVID-19 pandemic be ensured and the impact on our economic, social and, not least, health lives be minimised.
The egePan Unimed project aimed to translate the different regional pandemic concepts and the enormous wealth of experience and knowledge that went into their development into a coherent overall concept that would make it possible to manage the pandemic and its effects.
Drawing on approaches already developed at the beginning and during the pandemic (best practices), scientific findings in regional, national and international settings and taking into account the latest research results from the Network University Medicine, a prototypical model was developed that took into account all singular measures and was in turn regionally adaptable, i.e. took into account the federal structures and regional characteristics and was thus able to support them. The overarching goal remained to ensure the healthcare system's ability to act in the face of rising infection rates and growing numbers of patients requiring hospitalisation. This was achieved through the effective use of medical resources such as intensive care and respiratory beds as well as protective equipment and testing concepts.
Concrete results of egePan Unimed to ensure medical care in pandemic times along the care pathway include standardised surveys on effective measures for inpatient and outpatient pandemic management and transsectoral communication, as well as on the effects of the pandemic on the health of medical staff and corresponding strategies to ensure this, for example by establishing employee assistanceprogrammes.
In addition, a working group has been established that pools the expertise available in Germany with regard to mathematical modelling of the course of the pandemic and bed availability and, based on this, has developed ensemble models with forecasts of the necessary normal and intensive care bed capacity in hospitals and has actually used them in capacity management.
The use of routine data for pandemic management was tested in two use cases, with data-based risk stratification in particular attracting media attention as a basis for vaccination prioritisation, developed in cooperation with the RKI.
A working group was also established at several egePan Unimed locations to answer urgent questions relating to the pandemic using a standardised procedure and a toolbox that is accessible throughout the project.
In addition, international pandemic events and established pandemic control strategies were analysed with the aim of (partially) adapting them to the social and clinical circumstances of the German healthcare system
Several working groups also developed digitally supported infrastructure components for outpatient (remote COVID diagnostics and home monitoring) and inpatient (tele-intensive care) pandemic management. In addition, checklists for ensuring inpatient care and its quality and risk management were harmonised in Germany by the end of the project period.
The project results can be found in detail here. In addition, 66 publications have already been produced and published during the course of the project. The results of the modelling group have also formed the basis of the National Task Force's deliberations on several occasions.
For the 2022 NUM funding period, the egePan Unimed, B-Fast and CeoSys projects were called upon to work with all university hospitals in the NUM network to develop an application for an overarching overall NUM "Pandemic Preparedness" concept based on previous project results from the first funding phase. In this application, which was coordinated by Prof. Scheithauer (B-FAST) and Prof. Schmitt (egePan Unimed), central components from egePan such as "regional and inpatient pandemic management", "provision of evidence for pandemic management" and "modelling and risk stratification" were incorporated into the follow-up application. The application was approved and the project entitled PREPARED - PREparedness and PAndemic REsponse in "Germany" is expected to start in September 2022.