Smoking is the largest avoidable cause of preventable morbidity worldwide. It causes most of the cases of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and contributes to the development of other lung diseases. The control of smoking is considered as a highly important intervention for the prevention of lung diseases. Tobacco consumption is highly influenced by socioeconomic factors. SmokeFreeBrain aims to address the effectiveness of a multi-level variety of interventions aiming at smoking cessation in high risk target groups within High Middle Income Countries (HMIC) such as unemployed young adults, COPD and asthma patients, as well as within the general population in Low Middle Income Countries (LMIC). The project addresses existing approaches aiming to prevent lung diseases caused by tobacco while at the same time it develops new treatments and analyzes their contextual adaptability to the local and global health care system. SmokeFreeBrain follows an interdisciplinary approach exploiting consortium’s expertise in various relevant fields in order to generate new knowledge. State of the art techniques in toxicology, pulmonary medicine, neuroscience and behavior will be utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of: (i) Public Service Announcement (PSA) against smoking, (ii) the use of electronic cigarettes with and without nicotine as a harm reduction approach and/or cessation aid, (iii) a specifically developed neurofeedback intervention protocol against smoking addiction, (iv) a specifically developed intervention protocol based on behavioral therapy, social media/mobile apps and short text messages (sms) and (v) pharmacologic interventions. The main objective of the project is to evaluate the interventions in terms of health economics, by studying their cost-effectiveness, and proposing a scalable plan and a clear pathway to embedding the proposed interventions into policy and practice both in LMIC as well as in HMIC.

Focusing on chronic respiratory conditions (CRDs), LMICs pay an unfairly high cost in terms of morbidity and mortality. Along with the existence of CRDs, other multiple long-term chronic conditions co-exist, including ischemic heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, osteoporosis and depression. Current care in these countries presents significant shortcomings such as the limited availability of affordable and user-friendly digital tools for remote monitoring and patient engagement, while care fragmentation is even more evident creating substantial inequality to the health services and outcomes, greatly affecting their Universal Health Coverage. In this direction, the 48-month implementation research-driven MULTIPULM project aims to apply an integrated care digital-based ecosystem, consisting of evidence-based tools, for effectively managing long-term conditions and enhancing secondary prevention of multimorbid patients suffering from chronic respiratory conditions with the focus on LMIC countries of Brazil, Serbia and Türkiye. MULTIPULM approach and offerings aim to improve the QoL of patients and their families as well as tackle the social, financial, political and organizational disparities linked with high challenging management of multimorbidity, formulating a reference paradigm for other LMICs to follow. The successful implementation of the integrated care models paradigms will be orchestrated by a meticulous detailed implementation roadmap and local capacity building activities for the creation of a critical mass of local stakeholders. In this light, MULTIPULM will be validated at large-scale with 3200 multimorbid patients in the 3 targeted LMIC countries. Last but not least, a socio-economic and financial assessment is scheduled to support local policy makers in the continuation of the project activities beyond its duration, contributing to the long-term sustainability of its benefits and to the improvement of the targeted countries’ UHC index.

The overall objective of FAIR4Health is to facilitate and encourage European Union Health Research community to FAIRify, share and reuse their datasets derived from publically funded research initiatives through the demonstration of the potential impact that such a strategy will have on health outcomes and health and social care research. FAIR4Health vision for year 2020 is a vast, open community of EU health research institutions fully engaged to the Horizon 2020 ORD Mandate enhancing their knowledge-based economy and their research excellence thanks to the application of the FAIR data guiding principles. High quality health research and routine care data will be shared and reused in a secure, controlled and legally compliant environment in order to accelerate knowledge discovery while reducing the bias and enhancing the strength and quality of the scientific evidence raised by the FAIR4Health community members. Furthermore, a community of data scientists from both public research institutions and private companies will be attracted to develop advanced analytical solutions able to communicate with the FAIR4Health platform in order to provide data-driven innovative services that will enable a seamlessly application of the new evidence raised into the clinical practice. FAIR4Health has four specific objectives and will aim to deliver an effective outreach strategy at EU level, a FAIR data certification roadmap, an intuitive user-centered FAIR4Health platform and to demonstrate the potential impact that the implementation of such FAIR data strategy will have in terms of health outcomes and health research.