The project ALIAS addresses medical services and information inadequacy to ensure Health Care provisions in Alpine Space where telemedicine services are not widely exploited and linguistic barriers represent an obstacle. The Alpine Space´s touristic vocation during some periods of the year makes its Health Care structures "periodically" inadequate to face a widened request of services supply. On the other hand, a major receptivity of those structures during the rest of the year is unnecessary due to the low density of Alpine local residents. ALIAS addresses the programme objective aimed at securing fair access to Health Care public services and related communication infrastructure within the programming area. The project is aimed at linking together a number of Alpine Space hospitals enabling the creation of a network shaping the ALIAS Virtual Hospital for sharing medical information, adopting telemedicine service and exchanging best clinical practices, to improve the efficiency of hospitals.

The last six months have foreseen the continuation of the activities related to management, information&publicity and services functional and technical specification definition. Several meetings have been held with the twofold aim of properly advancing with ALIAS work and of consolidating the project partnership. Part of the work has been concentrated  on the  analysis of the current state of Partners IT systems in the healthcare sector and on a first description of services that will be deployed in the frame of ALIAS. This has given the reference framework on which the analysis of ALIAS pilots regional/national legal framework has been focussed in order to identifying major constraints related to services implementation. Moreover Partners have started analysing the most suitable technical solutions to be used in the development of ALIAS services to be compliant with users needs and regulatory framework.

During the last six months some important results have been achieved. 4 deliverables have been finalised and approved, the Project Management and Quality Manual, the Project Logo and Newsletter 1, and the Users requirements specification and scenarios description.
The first deliverable serves to facilitate the Project Participants cooperation in the ALIAS project by defining a set of rules for the organisation of the day-to-day cooperative work. The Project Logo is currently used in all official documents and presentations related to ALIAS. The Users requirements specification and scenarios description represents the first pillar on which functional and technical specification of ALIAS services platform will be shaped.
Two Project Steering Groups meetings and project Technical Meetings have been held, the first  in September, in Milano, together with the project kick off meeting and public presentation, the second in December in Udine.

The project specification phase will arrive at its end allowing the development and validation phase to define ALIAS services architecture, platform development and implementation. Organisational activities for the preparation of the eight ALIAS Hospitals to concretely piloting the services will be put in place so that the operational pilot demonstration of the Virtual Hospital Network can be achieved.