As our student challenge has come to an a few days ago, we want to make a post about all of the great things we have achieved in these 4 short months.

The grant funded us between 1st of March and 30th of June 2022.

We have started with nothing but an idea, there was no software out there to use, so we had decided to create our own. With funding from the University of Maribor we have managed to employ 8 students and 2 mentors for 4 months.

What we have done

In this short time we have managed to do a great lot. We have build software and connected with people all around the globe.

Software-wise

Our V0.1-alpha pre-release entails everything we have created. This includes:

• Anonymisation tool for patient entries
• EuReCa 3 & UtStein 2015 compliant online input form
• EuReCa 3 & UtStein 2015 compliant form integrated into software from the largest EMS provider in Slovenia
• Strong encryption for all of the data
• Database structure
• List of all EMSs in Slovenia and the area they are covering - not publicly available until now
• Tool connecting Bureau of Statistics in Slovenia and our EMS list, enabling us to get population data for Utstein compliant reporting

Networking-wise

We had a great opportunity given to us by Freddy Lippert, who invited us to come to EMS Glasgow 2022. There we were invited to the GRA meeting by Ann Doll. In-between we have met numerous new people, all with one goal in mind - improving OHCA survival. It was great to meet like-minded people that share the same passion. With new connections we will surely succeed.

We were also honoured to be able to present at the biggest EMS conference in Slovenia, SZUM Portorož 2022.

What have we communicated with the public

The work you do must be known to as many people as possible, if you want it to have a real world effect. We think that at least partially we have achieved that.

With all of the work listed here, we are proud to have 1 review article in the works, have presented at 1 conference and have been accepted to another 3 this year.

To communicate with lay public we have published 3 web-site news articles through our University PR department and have published 1 journal article in our University's news magazine.

We have also published more than 16 blog posts, detailing all of the work we are doing on the project and notify the public of important developments.

What are the experiences from the team

Students

Luka Petravić: For me this project represents what is good in our educational system. We got a chance to try new things and gather new experience. Medicine can be quite a traditional environment with a small leniency towards giving space for new technologies. Our mentors created a safe space for us to experiment, make mistakes and evolve, both professionally and personally. I am blessed to meet amazing individuals comprising my team, each of them is amazing and dedicated individual wanting to try new things and learn. I can only hope to run the project onwards and see what can we achieve with teamwork.

Rok Miklič: To me, SiOHCA represents a meaningful way in which we can significantly contribute to the advancement of medical science. I feel privileged to have been able to work alongside such amazing people and I'm thankful for the whole experience. I learned a lot about publishing, conferences, networking, communicating with developers, the importance of data in medicine, and out-of-hospital cardiac arrests.

Eva Poljanšek: This project helped me to expand my knowledge and skills on scientific method. I enjoyed working with my driven team, with whom I share the same enthusiasm for improving cardiac arrest outcomes in our country. I really look forward to continue working on SiOHCA and hopefully bringing the change to the system.

Urša Keše: Being a part of this incredible team and working on such a significant project makes me feel honoured. During the project I improved my coding skills, learned about the OHCA collection of medical data, and worked on my public speaking and teamwork abilities.

Evgenija Burger: I really enjoyed working on this project due to its interdisciplinary nature and the fact that OHCA registry is something that can improve the survival rate of OHCA patients in the future.

Domen Kulovec: I enjoyed meeting and working with young like minded people who are passionate about improving our healthcare system. Each and every one of us contributed to the common goal with their skill set.

Gašper Šircelj: I really enjoyed working with the team and learning about technologies that will benefit me and my career later on. I found that I have a great interest in medicine and that it is a field in which I will definitely work in the future.

Gašper Tomšič: I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge this project presented. It allowed me to get a glimpse not only into the inner workings of EMS services, but also the medical IT industry. The project also allowed me to hone my programming and problem solving skills, as well as working in a larger team and even international contacts.

Mentors

Matej Strnad: Firstly, I was thrilled by the enthusiasm and engagement of the students involved in the SiOHCA project. I was also impressed by their ideas and admired their self-initiative. Secondly, a brilliant idea of OHCA register was recognised and supported by all the partners who constructively helped us with the project. From my point of view, it was a great pleasure to mentor an incredible team of young colleagues getting experience in data management in medicine.

Miha Brezovnik: Working on this project was a personally fulfilling once in a lifetime experience. Members of the project have overcome many of potential drawback and invested a lot of effort. Teamwork, professionalism and communication were on the highest of levels. It was an honour to be a mentor to this young minds.

How are we moving forward

Moving forward, we will be volunteering our free time to make it possible to have digital data collection for EuReCa 3 study in Slovenia. This study will start on the 1st of September and end 3 months later.

We are also hopeful to get funding, as it is hard to work entirely for free. We are looking at different grant platforms and hoping to find one that suits us.

If we manage to secure funding we would like to expand the team and enable even more functionality than now.

Thank you!

We would like to thank everybody that have made it possible to get to where we are now. We could not have imagined to get an experience like this when we started. We would like to thank our faculty manager Tatjana Golob, who helped us navigate the bureaucracy of this endeavour. We would also like to thank Faculty of Medicine, University of Maribor for giving us full support in all of the activities we deemed important - funding the Glasgow trip, giving gifts for all of the people that helped us and enabling us to use University infrastructure. We would like to thank to team at Sledilnik, as they helped us many times with their expertise, especially Štefan Baebler, Ana Slavec and Joh Dokler.
There are many more and we thank them all!