DIGITALHEALTH EUROPE

Starts: 01/01/19

Ends: 30/06/21

Support to a Digital Health and Care Innovation initiative in the context of Digital Single Market strategy

Scope and objectives

The project’s approach involves actions that will boost innovation and advance the three Digital Single Market priorities for the digital transformation of health and care (DTHC):

citizens’ secure access to and sharing of health data across borders
better data to advance research, disease prevention and personalised health and care
digital tools for citizen empowerment and person-centred care.

To achieve these three priorities, the project work plan offers two forms of support.

Support to large scale deployment of digital solutions for person-centred integrated care: Assessment tools will be used to identify, analyse and select successful initiatives which are highly impactful and replicable. The selected initiatives will have the opportunity to pursue replication and scaling-up with the aid of instruments such as matchmaking and a twinning support scheme. A deployment support service will include guidelines, checklists and documented successful approaches as well as structured advice on EU funding instruments and financing sources. These results will contribute to capacity building. They will help define the “building blocks” for the scaling-up of innovative practices.
Support to DTHC innovation through collaboration platforms: DigitalHealthEurope will also facilitate the creation of collaboration platforms that directly address the three above mentioned priorities for the digital transformation of health and care.

ECHAlliance role

In the frame of the deployment support activities we are leading a task aimed at analysing the technical barriers to the implementation at scale of person-centred health and care solutions and the need to mobilise investments thereby focusing on both the demand side (policy-makers, healthcare providers, patients/citizens, insurers) and the supply side (large companies, start-ups and SMEs, researchers). The purpose is the identification and analysis of exemplary cases allowing to extrapolate good models, whereas:

long term investment strategies meeting the reform needs of the health systems are being adopted
investments are being planned following an integrated approach, which considers the investment needs for infrastructure, technology and service models
innovative contractual and payment models, blended financing approaches and innovative partnership models are adopted.
architecture and solution features and requirements are taken into account to ensure citizens’ access to EHR and more widely to personal data and to enable better patient/professional/provider communication.

Complementarily, the identification of countries/regions with no examples of person-centred care solutions and analysis of the barriers for their adoption will be carried out.

In the frame of the activities aimed to support the first priority (Citizens’ secure access to and sharing of health data), ECHAlliance is responsible of delivering a set of recommendations and guidelines on citizen-controlled data governance models and data donation campaigns for health. Such recommendations will be based on a preliminary study of innovative citizen controlled data governance models (e.g. health data cooperatives among others) and the outcomes of an international workshop whereas key experts will discuss and compare the different options. In addition, donation programmes and incentives from health and other domains are being analysed with the aim to build a prototype of a health data donation campaign, e.g. raising awareness about the benefits of data sharing, including creating key messages and channels for such campaigns, exploring incentives models to engage EU citizens in this societal ambition.

Consortium

The consortium is composed by 17 partners from 10 European countries: empirica Gesellschaft für Kommunikations- und Technologieforschung mbH (coordinator), AGE Platform Europe, Central European Initiative – Executive Secretariat, European Alliance for Personalised Medicine, European Connected Health Alliance, European Coordination Committee of the Radiological Electromedical and Healthcare IT Industry, European Health Telematics Association, The European Institute for Health Records, European Patients Forum (EPF), European Regions Research and Innovation Network, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, FUNKA Nu Ab, The International Foundation for Integrated Care, The Lisbon Council for Economic Competitiveness and Social Renewal asbl, Open Evidence, Reference Site Collaborative Network, Serviços Partilhados do Ministério da Saúde.