Digital tools for citizen empowerment and for person-centred care with a particular focus on the interaction between citizens and healthcare providers

We are pleased to remind you that as of May 2019 EPF has formally kicked off with its activities and tasks in the DigitalHealthEurope project, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme.

What Is DigitalHealthEurope?
Digital Health Europe involves a number of actions that will boost innovation and advance the Digital Single Market priorities for the digital transformation of health and care . The three top priorities are matched to three working communities: each one will carry out different types of activities with a range of purposes and to engage with varying expert profiles throughout the project. Each will produce results on two complementary working levels: a policy and an expert level. The goal is to put forth, based on a common agenda, actionable recommendations, agreements and white papers. Representatives of the three each of the three communities joined forces in a one-day meeting in Brussels earlier in the month in order to align work streams, brainstorm new ways to achieve efficiency and decide on next steps for the upcoming months.

What is EPF’s role?
EPF will be leading one of three communities focused on assessing and evaluating various digital tools contributing to more patient empowerment and person-centred care with a particular focus on the interaction between patients and healthcare providers.

Different digital solutions will be identified for the project part affecting the patient community. The work led by EPF will aim to find solutions for better interaction between citizens and healthcare providers. In order to do this, there will be a two-staged approach. Firstly, we will develop a methodology to evaluate which solutions are the most useful in improving the healthcare professional/patient relationship. At a later stage, this will be applied to the different solutions that the project (as a whole) will identify.

EPF will ensure the selected solutions lead to a holistic, person-centred, equitable, quality care model. Through collaboration with organisations such as AGE Platform Europe and the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine we will guarantee that the solutions are useful to everyone (regardless of their gender, age, ethnic origin, religion or belief, and sexual orientation). The solutions need also to be applicable to fields such as personalised medicine and ‘omics. Ultimately, EPF will develop an empowerment roadmap for healthcare providers and larger scale healthcare ecosystems so that they can use digital solutions to provide better care for patients.

Find more information about Digital Health Europe here.