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 aim of the “European network staff eXchange for integrAting precision health in the health Care sysTems (ExACT)” is to train a new generation of professionals that can contribute to the future of health and healthcare (HC), by providing high-quality, multidisciplinary knowledge in precision health. The greater personalisation of HC is a driver of innovation for research, and for the healthcare system and industry. Still policy makers, HC professionals, citizens, and private companies need to take some steps to realize its potential. In order to harness this challenging landscape, the ExACT consortium provides a cohesive framework for training staff across 7 EU Countries, 1 AC and 2 TCs. During 4 years, the staff involved will be trained on research topics not available at the home institutions thanks to 74 secondments. They will attend courses, workshops, seminars, conferences, and will participate in organizing outreach activities, thus acquiring new skills. Research topics include: Integration of Big Data and digital solutions into the HC systems; Designing and promoting innovative citizen engagement models; Education of healthcare professionals and leadership; Health Technology Assessment in precision health; Ethical-legal, social, organisational and policy issues surrounding precision health. ExACT is embedded in existing cooperation structures, such as the RISE-PRECeDI project, IC PerMed, and CSA TO-REACH. The consortium consists of 14 beneficiaries and 2 partners, of which 10 are academic institutions including Stanford University where a precision health program has been launched, and 7 non academics including 2 SMEs. The participants will produce key reports, policy recommendations, scientific publications, and information materials for citizens, thus fostering public-private interactions. In the long run, ExACT will foster the integration of precision health in the EU HC systems, thus contributing to better health for Europeans citizens.

Prostate Cancer (PCa) is the second leading cause of cancer, among men in Europe. There are currently major unmet needs in this field, such as insufficient knowledge on risk factors that contribute to PCa and on patient characteristics (including genetic profiles) that could facilitate patient stratification. Finally, there is lack of meaningful engagement of all key stakeholders, while the knowledge currently gained from clinical practice and real life data is not being fed back into PCa patients’ care pathways. There is thus a need for better definition of PCa across all stages, improved patient’s stratification at diagnosis, and standardisation of PCa-related outcomes based on real life data. PIONEER’s unique dual approach is to first identify critical evidence gaps in PCa by respected Key Opinion Leaders, and then embark on a research priority setting exercise that reflects the needs of all key stakeholders in PCa management. To achieve this, PIONEER has brought together comprehensive datasets that consists of the most relevant prostate clinical trials and registries, large epidemiological cohorts, electronic heath records, and real-life data from different European (and non-European) patient populations. These unique data sets will be integrated, standardised, harmonised and analysed using approaches that are built on our experience of similar previous IMI projects i.e EMIF, and eTRIKS, and analysed using a unique set of methodologies and advanced analytics methods (OMOP, eHS). PIONEER has already performed a first PCa research priority setting survey, where major stakeholders were asked to identify the current unmet needs in PCa. The five most important open questions will be used as pilot studies to verify PIONEER’s research framework. As such, PIONEER’s deliverables will be outcome-driven, value-based and patient-centric, and relevant to all key stakeholders, as they would have been meaningfully involved from the inception of the project.

Despite significant recent progress in the field of hematological malignancies (HMs), with increasing survival rates and improvement in quality of life, many children and adults with HMs still die from these disorders or experience disabling complications. Therefore, improvement of health care of HMs is an unmet medical need. Thus, it is important to define and align standard and efficient sets of HMs outcomes to measure and evaluate HM data for clinical decisions, long term risk/benefit profile, reimbursement, value analysis, and clinical trials design. Improving outcome measures and endpoint definitions by taking into account “real-life” data and differences in cross-national healthcare practice will undoubtedly result in an optimized, sustainable and effective treatment delivery, as well as in desirable and innovative accelerated pathways for novel drug availability. All these challenges will be addressed within a pan-EU perspective by HARMONY (Healthcare Alliance for Resourceful Medicines Offensive against Neoplasms in HematologY), a comprehensive public-private European consortium of excellence. HARMONY consortium is made up of 51 partners: 44 participants from 10 European countries and 7 pharmaceutical companies from the EFPIA. HARMONY aims to assemble, assess, connect, and analyze heterogeneous HM patient derived Big Data sets to define sets of outcome indicators that can be used for decision-making by key healthcare stakeholders. The consortium will orchestrate leading experts and working cooperative groups in HMs, European study alliances, pharmaceutical market leaders, patient advocacy groups, HTA and regulatory agencies, to: (i) optimize Europe-wide data collection and create a high-quality HM data repository for further explorative studies; (ii) establish a clinical data-sharing platform that empowers clinicians, patients and policy stakeholders to improve decision-making procedures and identify appropriate treatments to patients with HMs

The Beyond 1 Million Genomes (B1MG) consortium will establish the support and coordination structure for the European 1+ Million Genomes initiative (1+MG), which is based upon the commitment of 20 European Member States and Norway that have signed the Declaration ‘Towards access to at least 1 million sequenced genomes in the EU by 2022’. Collectively, these countries have committed to establish a cross-border federated network of national genome collections associated with phenotypic data, consented for advancing health and medicine practices across Europe. Europe is uniquely placed to take on this challenge and position itself as a global leader in this field. B1MG will go ‘beyond’ the 1M genome target and ‘beyond’ the 20 signatory countries. The project will collaborate with an array of international initiatives and consult a range of stakeholders to support the creation of a pan-European genome-based health data infrastructure, encompassing data quality and exchange standards, access protocols and legal guidance. Recommendations will be translated to a B1MG maturity level model that provides concrete guidance on the steps required to implement personalised medicine, a healthcare approach that takes into account a person’s genetic make-up, at local, regional and national-scale. Personalised medicine is expected to bring significant socio-economic benefits, including more efficient national health systems. Faster and more accurate diagnosis, the development of pharmacogenomics and advancement of preventative medicine will lead to better health, quality of life of patients and increased life expectancy. This will be captured in a methodology for economic evaluation, forming the basis of future business-cases for implementation in the health sector.