Empowering emergency medicine through data and collaboration, ESCORT (AI-enabled healthcare services During Cross-Border Medical Emergencies and Regular Patient Services) began as an ambitious Horizon Europe initiative uniting clinicians, technologists, and patient advocates from six countries. From the very first workshops—held in Greece, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, and Israel—the project’s direction was shaped by those on the front lines: paramedics, nurses, hospital administrators, chronic patients, and public-health officials. Their insights defined ten modular toolkits, each designed not as standalone gadgets but as interconnected pieces of a wider digital fabric, capable of guiding decisions when minutes can mean the difference between life and death.
When a natural disaster strikes and dozens of injured victims pour into emergency departments, ESCORT’s real-time vital-sign tracking and resource-allocation dashboards come into play. Data streams from wearables—everything from in-ear pulse oximeters to Bluetooth-enabled stethoscopes—flow through a robust ingestion layer into an Interoperable Data Lake. There, time-series forecasting models (like ARIMA and its seasonal cousin, SARIMA) predict patient surges, while optimization engines ensure ambulances and beds are routed and assigned without delay. Early pilot simulations have already shown that these algorithms can shave precious minutes off response times, smoothing the bottlenecks that too often cripple overwhelmed EDs.
But ESCORT isn’t only about crisis response. In everyday chronic-care management—think diabetes or COPD—patients wear discreet sensors that continuously feed biometric data back to clinicians. AI-driven triage algorithms assess trends, flagging anomalies and prompting secure alerts between home-care teams and hospitals. Patients enjoy greater independence and peace of mind, knowing their medical data are monitored around the clock. At the same time, healthcare providers gain a bird’s-eye view of cohort health, enabling preventive interventions long before emergencies arise.
Preparing for pandemics requires yet another layer of coordination. ESCORT’s public-health dashboards integrate outbreak modeling, cross-border quarantine protocols, and countermeasure distribution plans, all in one unified interface. By aligning data streams from multiple nations under common metadata standards, the platform breaks down information silos and empowers authorities to synchronize efforts across borders—exactly the kind of agility HERA (the European Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority) envisions for Europe’s next public-health crisis.
Behind these capabilities lies a carefully engineered architecture. A scalable message-bus layer (using Kafka or RESTful APIs) funnels device telemetry into the central data lake. AI and analytics modules run both classic statistical models and modern deep-learning networks, while secure front- and back-end dashboards offer intuitive controls for staff training simulations, resource planning, and after-action reviews. Two of ESCORT’s standout toolkits—the Urgent & Emergency Resource Management module and the AI-Driven Integrated Treatment suite—exemplify this design philosophy. The former uses combinatorial optimization libraries to tackle NP-hard scheduling problems, and the latter stitches together continuous biometric assessments with encrypted communication channels, ensuring no critical alert ever goes unheard.
As the first results roll in, the project team reports feasibility in real-time data exchange across borders, high user satisfaction with the platform’s dashboards, and promising accuracy in patient-flow forecasts. Looking forward, ESCORT will refine its toolkits, explore generative AI for dynamic scenario simulations, and extend pilots to additional regions, driving toward a future where healthcare systems everywhere can respond to both emergencies and everyday needs with unprecedented speed and precision.
For a concise overview of ESCORT’s vision, architecture, and partner contributions, you can consult the official ESCORT Project Brochure, which was distributed at the 22nd ISCRAM Conference in Halifax, Canada, in May 2025.
Floros, G., Chandramouli, K., Petanidis, S., … Martignano, M., et al. (2025). AI enabled healthcare services during cross-border medical emergencies and regular patient services (ESCORT project): System architecture and first results in Emergency Medicine Scenario. CoRe paper, Proceedings of the 22nd ISCRAM Conference, Halifax, Canada, May 2025.
ESCORT Project Brochure. Distributed at the 22nd ISCRAM Conference, Halifax, Canada, May 2025.