Healthcare Resiliency Program (HRP): Make Rural Tennessee Healthy Again (MaRTHA)

Perinatal and Pediatric Behavioral Health Teleconsultation and Education Project is sponsored by Tennessee Department of Health (Rural Health Transformation Program). This inaugural funding opportunity of the Rural Health Transformation Program will support the use of technology to expand access to behavioral health education and consultation services, designed to improve health outcomes for women, infants, and children in rural communities.

IA Resilience call reinforcing Europe's strenght in health is sponsored by European Commission — Horizon Europe. Expected Outcome: the proposals under this call are expected to address one or more of the following subjects : • Enhanced personalized monitoring, care and treatments, focusing on the development of highly customized healthcare solutions, including the required research and diagnostic tools, tailored to individual needs, covering various scenarios such as chronic disease management, physiotherapy, precision diagnosis, personalized medicine/treatment, pre- and postoperative care, and daily assistance in homes and common spaces. It also targets effective management of chronic diseases and elderly care through personalized monitoring and interventions facilitated by advanced sensor technologies and edge-to-cloud solutions. This includes the development and integration of solutions for Hospitalization at Home, enabling patients to receive complex, remotely supervised care using intelligent medical devices capable of sensing, analysing, and transmitting real-time data. This requires a continuum, from in-hospital diagnostics to robust, long-term patient support at home via AI-driven care pathways and hospitalization at home. • Prevention and treatment of diseases, allowing the improved scientific understanding, early detection and proactive prevention of diseases through scientific research, continuous monitoring, predictive analytics, and timely alerts, possibly powered by AI algorithms. This preventive approach enables early intervention and significantly reduces risks associated with many illnesses such as viral infections (e.g. epi- and pan demics), cardiovascular diseases, diabetes complications affecting the health of the young and old. • Efficient, scalable, and cost-effective healthcare, demonstrating how ECS-based technologies can streamline clinical workflows, reduce administrative burdens, and improve resource allocation in healthcare systems. This includes automation and intelligent operations management across clinical, diagnostic, and homecare settings, ultimately improving cost-effectiveness and scalability. • Secure and compliant healthcare continuum, including solutions that ensure robust data protection and regulatory compliance (e.g. GDPR), particularly in handling sensitive health data. Projects should adopt privacy-by-design principles and implement secure data handling architectures using localized edge computing, encryption, authentication, and anonymization strategies within both clinical and assisted living environments. • Seamless interoperability across devices, systems, and platforms, addressing the integration of heterogeneous systems across the edge-to-cloud continuum. Solutions should rely on open standards and modular architectures to ensure interoperability, flexibility, and adaptability across various healthcare settings and use cases, fostering a unified European health-tech ecosystem. Programme areas: Horizon Europe (HORIZON), Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness, Digital, Industry and Space

Road Safety and resilience of rural areas is sponsored by European Commission — Horizon Europe. Expected Outcome: Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes: Implementation of the NWRSA methodology for secondary rural roads; Innovative and effective enforcement strategies, incentive mechanisms and measures raising risk awareness for fostering safer behaviour; Prevention strategies for reducing road fatalities and serious road traffic injuries on rural roads along with the respective implementation guidelines and policy measures tailored to the responsible stakeholders (regional authorities, police, healthcare professionals, national governments, etc.); GIS-based application to assist local and regional authorities in identifying and mapping the impact of extreme weather phenomena and other natural disasters (such as floods, fires, storms, heavy snowfall etc.) on the safety and resilience of the road network in their jurisdiction. Scope: With more than 50% of all EU road fatalities occurring in rural areas along with evidence suggesting that crashes and crash-related fatalities in rural roads vary from those in urban roads or motorways, it is imperative to understand and mitigate the safety risks in rural roads in view of the EU’s ambition to move towards Vision Zero by 2050. Local and regional authorities have an important role to play to reduce road fatalities and serious injuries. In the EU, the Road Infrastructure Safety Management (RISM) Directive introduced the concept of network-wide road safety assessment (NWRSA) and the concept of proactive road safety assessment through the understanding of the in-built safety of roads. Considering safety at the network-level allows for an overview of the road safety performance instead of focusing on isolated parts of it, while the in-built safety assessment aims to identify parts of the road that have been omitted by crash-based analyses (such crash clusters or hotspot analysis) as they do not concentrate the majority of crashes, yet are crash-prone and/or uncomfortable to navigate. According to the provisions of the RISM Directive, a methodology has been developed to assess the network-wide safety of motorways and primary rural roads based on their combined crash-based and in-built safety assessments. While this is a first step in understanding road safety conditions on rural roads, secondary and lower-class roads are not covered and, at the same time, there is not adequate information on road user behaviour. In an ageing society, cognitive and physical impairments pose an increasing threat to safe mobility. In rural areas, people with any kind of impairment or disability often lack alternatives to driving a car for their mobility needs. Addressing these issues will not only enhance road safety but also improve the quality of life and prevent the social exclusion of these people. In addition to road safety issues, local and regional authorities manage risks associated with extreme weather phenomena and other natural disasters like floods, fires, storms or heavy snowfall. As these may affect safety and operations, relevant authorities need to adopt a more holistic resilience monitoring and response. Research should support addressing these challenges by undertaking all the following actions in at least three regions covering both primary and secondary rural roads of adequate length to allow for region-level comparisons: Demonstrate the practical applicability of the NWRSA methodology and expand its use to all rural roads for an easy, low-cost, flexible and transparent, yet sufficiently accurate assessment of road infrastructure safety. Identify information gaps and propose methods to leverage available data to supplement the understanding of crash causation and outcomes. Develop prevention strategies and measures to reduce fatalities and serious injuries in rural areas with a focus on high-risk locations and situations and on improving road user behaviour. This includes the development of reliable and easy-to-use methods to provide qua Programme areas: Horizon Europe (HORIZON), Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness, Climate, Energy and Mobility, Industrial Competitiveness in Transport, Clean, Safe and Accessible Transport and Mobility, Smart Mobility