DigitalHealthEurope will provide comprehensive, centralised support to the digital transformation of health and care (DTHC) priorities of the Digital Single Market. The partners bring a broad range of collective knowledge and expertise, originating from the longstanding leadership and engagement in the whole spectrum of activities, from interoperability and standards to health service innovation and from the technical to the policy level. The project will support large-scale deployment of digital solutions for person-centred integrated care by identifying, analysing, and facilitating the replication of highly impactful best practices, utilising the consortium’s exceptional expertise on knowledge management and impact assessment (EIP on AHA repository of innovative practices, MAFEIP), twinning schemes, and mobilisation of stakeholders. A marketplace will enable organisations to find suitable partnerships. At least 46 twinnings ranging from adaptation of impactful best practices to full adoption will be carried out. A funding advice service and capacity building framework will be provided to further stimulate deployment and scale up. Building on the unique composition of the consortium, the project will establish and manage 3 collaboration platforms to align all efforts of ongoing and future initiatives supporting the 3 DTHC priorities. The partners will utilise their vast network of more than 1,100 members representing national, regional, and EU-wide stakeholders. The collaborative work will lead to common strategic agendas and commitments for action that will boost innovation and progress in the respective topics. A Board of Associated Experts with proven high-level competence on all key fields will support the delivery of an actionable strategic vision and recommendations for EU policy beyond 2020.

The PREFER project will deliver an overview and evaluation of preference elicitation methods to be applied in the entire drug life cycle, i.e. in the early stages of identifying medical needs, in clinical testing, to guide decisions on reimbursement and to make decisions on withdrawal of drugs from the market. A broad array of (combinations of) patient preference methods will be tested prospectively in a large number of case studies. The availability of large patient cohorts will enable to test new methods or deviations from existing methods in a randomized manner, by comparing well-known methods with newer ones. The use of simulation studies will both contribute to smarter design of case studies and to exploring the sensitivity of outcomes of preference studies. Based on discussions with a broad representation of stakeholders e.g. patients, patient organisations, regulatory authorities, HTA bodies and reimbursement agencies, suitable methods will be tested and their contributions to improved decision making will be discussed in recommendations adapted to the needs of all relevant stakeholders. The recommendations from PREFER are expected to lead to changed practices, in that industry will routinely assess whether a preference study would add value at key decision points in the medicinal product life cycle and, if so, implement patient-preference elicitation studies according to the PREFER project recommendations. The PREFER consortium consist of 16 industry partners and 16 academic and SME members including representation from academia, patient organizations, HTA bodies, reimbursement agencies, and project management.

In the first five years of operations, EATRIS has shown strong proof of concept of the value of the services portfolio, with users ranging from academia, SMEs, large pharma, to biotech and research funding organisations. The overarching aim of EATRIS-Plus is to support the long-term sustainability (LTS) of EATRIS by delivering innovative scientific tools to the research community, strengthening the infrastructure’s financial model and reinforcing EATRIS leadership in the European Research Area (ERA), particularly in the field of Personalised Medicine (PM) research and development. Specific objectives are: (i) To consolidate EATRIS capacities in the field of PM to better serve academia and industry and augment the number of EATRIS Innovation Hubs with large pharma; (ii) To further strengthen the LTS of EATRIS financial model; (iii) To drive patient empowerment through active involvement in the infrastructure’s operations; (iv) To expand strategic partnerships with Research Infrastructures and other relevant stakeholders. The proposal relies on a scientific and technological programme combined with capacity-building activities across 16 EU countries, with the support of two umbrella organisations representing patient organisations and SMEs. EATRIS-Plus will help pooling and exploiting the translational academic capacities of the infrastructure in omic technologies to enable researchers to better address the scientific and societal challenge of PM. Additionally, the coordination office and 13 existing national nodes of the infrastructure will participate in implementing joint outreach, training, industry engagement and international collaboration activities to further build national capacity, increase users’ trust and strengthen EATRIS and the ERA global scientific leadership.

The European Patients' Academy on Therapeutic Innovation (EUPATI) IMI project resulted in a number of key outputs for the field of patient engagement. The core activities continue running until 2019 under a PPP consortium under an EPF programme focusing on the Patient Expert Training Course, the multilingual public Toolbox, and the EUPATI National Platforms Network. It is imperative that these pillars that support the patient engagement landscape exist in the medium- and long-term to address the growing field of patient engagement. Further investment is needed to develop sustainable models of collaboration to ensure this, and put into place the infrastructure required for these to work, building on those already established under IMI-EUPATI.

COMPAR-EU aims to identify, compare, and rank the most effective and cost-effective self-management interventions (SMIs) for adults in Europe within four high-priority chronic conditions: type 2 diabetes, obesity, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and heart failure. This project addresses an important gap in current knowledge applying network meta-analysis, an extension of meta-analysis methodology that allows multiple (rather than pairwise) comparisons of intervention effectiveness, to randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that meet the study inclusion criteria. This centralised analysis of an estimated 4000 RCTs will substantially help to overcome current problems associated with the dispersion and duplication of evidence. The work will be based on a validated taxonomy of SMIs and will prioritise outcomes from the patients’ perspective. In addition, a cost-effectiveness of the most effective SMIs will be estimated to provide insights into the economic consequences of adopting SMIs for societies, healthcare budgets, and patients. Contextual factors associated with successful interventions will also be studied. Drawing on our results, we will develop and pilot decision-making tools to facilitate access to evidence-based information on the most effective SMIs to key users through a user-friendly interactive platform. A multiprong strategy for exploitation of the research findings will lead to clear business cases for implementing it in different contexts within the heterogeneous EU health system. The end goal of the project is to have an impact in supporting policy-makers, guideline developers, researchers, industry, professionals and patients to make informed decisions on the identification and implementation of the most suitable SMIs, therefore contributing to the diffusion of the knowledge, healthcare sustainability and equity and promoting EU competitiveness in a globally emerging market.