Personalised medicine (PM) represents a paradigm shift away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach to the treatment and care of patients with a particular condition, to one which uses emergent approaches in particular technological areas such as diagnostic tests, functional genomic technologies, molecular pathways (etc.) to better manage patients’ health and to target therapies. Nowadays the challenge for national and regional authorities is to enable the shift from a REACTIVE healthcare system (based on episodic and acute care model) to a PREVENTIVE (stratifying at-risk individuals and ensure that preventive action is taken to intervene well before the onset of symptoms, let alone illness) and PREDICTIVE (leverage and integrate cutting-edge technologies to not only stratify risk, but even predict risk and intervene even further upstream) system – the so called Personalised Health (PH). In the face of this potential huge leap forward, the fact that personalised health lacks the cooperation and coordination needed to organise the still very fragmented field is a severe drawback to its development and to the placement of investments in an effective manner. For this reason, it is crucial to direct major efforts towards coordinating and aligning relevant stakeholders in personalised health action across Europe and beyond; create a participatory approach; build trust; enable a multi-stakeholder process; channel investments towards Personalised Health. All this considered, Regions4PerMed will coordinate regional policies and innovation programmes in Personalised Medicine and Personalised Health to accelerate the deployment of PH for citizens and patients. The project will reinforce the cooperation between H 2020 and ESIF on PH aspects; Strengthen industrial specialisation areas in Europe and allow PH to flourish as an Emerging Industry; Enable interregional joint investment on PH, including a stable link with Vanguard Initiative and with the European Innovation Council.

In the medium to longer-term, the fiscal space that governments have to provide additional budgetary resources will shrink, including for healthcare. Our response is that it is better to pre-empt rather than repair i.e., to incentivise new ways of financing health promotion and disease prevention. The financing solution is smart capacitating investment. This means sharing risks and resources to invest at scale across multiple levels within health ecosystems generating sustainable returns and localised benefits. The specific objectives are: 1. Draw on available evidence to strengthen how smart capacitating investment is framed and communicated 2. Assess and enhance organisational readiness for testing SCI models in the regional test-beds 3. Develop and test business models that are compatible with smart capacitating investment 4. Develop and test novel finance models to determine which of the business models align with pre-defined contingencies for delivering smart capacitating investment 5. Develop and test a prototype collaborative platform for governing smart capacitating investment in health promotion and prevention. With an interdisciplinary approach we calibrate and harmonise 3 main work streams: developing functional prototype models of the anchoring concept (smart capacitating investment) [WP2-4]; iterative testing in real world environments (ES,DE,SE,UK initially with an Open Call for a 2nd tranche of transition and less developed regions) to show relevance in tax and insurance-based systems [WP5-6]; preparing a social franchising package for large-scale demonstration [WP7]. Underpinning these workstreams, we will also explore and test platform-based collaborative spaces for the involvement of resourced citizen panels and local communities in planning and investment decisions for interventions and services. The project generates concrete outcomes and impacts for further development and uptake of smart capacitating investment that disrupts state-of-the-art.

This project will research and define how health and care professionals and patients will use ICT technologies to plan interventions with patients and to monitor the progression of their physical and mental state. It will investigate and document the requirements for Decision Support Tools that can be created, deployed and embedded into the daily routines of patients and Health and Care Professionals to deliver quality standardised care across a large population of chronic and elderly patients. This will include the technology requirements and use cases for sharing Care Plans between professionals and patients as well as the scope and depth of integration between new productivity and care coordination toolsets and current EMR recording software. EMPATITCS will undertake further research and collate current global examples of self-management services that have been clinically proven to positively impact the health of a population. It will study the socio-economic and age dependency factors that affect awareness, uptake and adherence to self-management services. This will define and design a best in class self-management service that provide the educational and informational services that a large population of elderly and chronic patients require to self-manage. The emphasis will be of the use of appropriate technology to scale the service and to connect with population groups that are difficult to reach due to geographic or demographic factors.