The CAPABLE project team met for the kick-off meeting on January 20-22, 2020 in Rome, Italy, at the
premises of the patients’ association partner AIMaC. Choosing this location for the project kick-off
wanted to underline the central role of the patient and their caregivers in the project. The meeting was
chaired by the project coordinator Silvana Quaglini from the University of Pavia.
The first day was aimed at introducing partners and their teams, learning about the project milestones and deliverables and getting familiar with project administrative procedures and tools. We also had a chance to see a presentation by the project officer Margherita Fanos.
The second day focused on issues related with understanding the needs of stakeholders (patients and
physicians), already available data sets, including records of cancer patients from ICSM and NKI,
questionnaires on patient needs and patient forum entries from AIMaC, and available clinical practice
guidelines related to the management of melanoma and kidney cancer. Moreover, we were
demonstrated the ALIUM system from Deontics for authoring and executing computer interpretable
guidelines. In the evening, there was a surprise – team building activities including pizza making (!) and
dinner.
The third day was devoted to technical topics, including filling-in the template for data management
plan, and defining Task Forces for the overall system architecture (TF1) and use cases and their
implementation (TF2). We also discussed the issues related to dissemination of results, such as project
logo and website, management of social media, open access publication and authorship policy.
The kick-off meeting gave us a great opportunity to meet in person and to start hard work on the
project, also interviewing some patients and their caregivers, which allowed starting collecting the
system requirements from their real-world experience. Now looking forward to the next meeting in
Pavia…
