All 11 entities that have applied for support in this call have fulfilled its conditions and can thus benefit from allocated funds from the Recovery and Resilience Plan of Slovakia. For thousands, especially cancer patients, this will mean that waiting times for radiotherapy are reduced in the near future, as well as the quality of healthcare provided.
The call launched in August 2022: https://www.health.gov.sk/Clanok?Plan-Radiotherapy is intended to provide software and hardware equipment that supports the automated contouring of risk organs (OAR) to reduce the time of contouring of the OAR, thereby improving the quality of healthcare for cancer patients in radiation treatment. Currently, each radiation oncologist spends on average between 30% and 50% of his working time by segmenting (contouring) sections from computer tomography. The aim of this project is therefore to reduce the average time spent by the radiation oncologist in contouring the risk organs by at least 50% compared to the current situation. The proposed solution should save the radiation oncologist at least 15% of his total working time. The number of 127 radiation oncologists in Slovakia with a summary commitment of 83.2 is expected to bring savings of 3.8 mills Euro in 5 years.
Lukáš Stanko, Director-General of the Implementation Section of the Recovery and Resilience and Reform Plan of the Slovak Republic: I am personally very pleased that this challenge of medicine is also included in the recovery plan, not only helpful but also necessary for proper diagnosis or treatment of patients. New devices will help radiation oncologists, help patients, and the state will save more than investment. Ministry staff have made every effort to make the challenge as successful as it is.–
The Ministry of Health has the ambition to significantly improve the pace of fulfilling milestones from the Recovery and Resilience Plan of Slovakia. Michal Palkovič, State Secretary, Ministry of Health: – I can confirm that we have added staff capacities to the resort and optimized internal processes in evaluating applications in open calls. I firmly believe that we will soon be able to talk about much higher numbers of approved applications than has been the case so far.–