SEURO – EU Research to help advance the transfer of digital health technologies to support home-based chronic disease self-management and integrated care across the EU
Last month the new digital health research programme ‘SEURO’ (Scaling EUROpean citizen-driven transferable and transformative digital health) was launched. SEURO has been awarded €3.9 million under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme, providing the potential to comprehensively advance home-based health and well-being self-management. Imec is a proud partner of the project, which brings together an EU consortium of research institutions, SMEs, health service providers, EU networks, and industry partners.
SEURO (2021-2024), will advance research into the use of digital technologies to support health services and organisations across the EU to support older adults self-managing with multiple chronic health conditions. The specific focus of the project will be on advancing the ProACT platform which has been successfully developed and tested at a proof-of-concept level under a previous H2020 award. ProACT aims to empower individuals over 65 living at home with chronic diseases/multimorbidity to better understand and independently manage their health and well-being.
SEURO will further evaluate the use and potential of the ProACT platform parallel to three new digital self-assessment and recommendation tools to support healthcare organisations and services in preparing, adopting, and transferring digital health solutions into practice. The SEURO study will be conducted in 4 EU member states: Belgium, Ireland, Sweden, and Italy.
imec – SMIT – VUB will lead WP5 exploring economic evaluation, value network analysis and co-ordinate the creation of exploitation and business plans. imec – SMIT – VUB will also play a key role in transferring and providing feedback on the SEURO tools (ProTransfer, ProBCF, ProInsight) tools to the Flemish trial site region in Belgium. It will also be involved in preparing and executing research activities of EIH trial in Belgium, including ethics and data management.
Digital health and the impact of SEURO
The arrival of COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption and implementation of newer, safer digital tools for healthcare. Health systems globally, including the Belgian health system, are under significant pressure due to our ageing population, and disparities in the number of practicing healthcare professionals. ProACT has the potential to support the Belgian healthcare service to decentralise care to the community, supporting older adults and their care networks.
Outcomes from the ‘SEURO project’ will help provide key evidence to the potential cost-effectiveness of this digital solution, advancing citizen-centric digital integrated care to support proactive health and well-being in Belgium.
The Trinity Centre for Practice and Healthcare Innovation is co-ordinating SEURO, an ambitious EU digital health research project to support older adults self-managing with multiple chronic health conditions. It targets Europe’s 50 million multi-morbid patients.
The consortium involves 12 partners across five EU states. ‘SEURO’ (Scaling EUROpean citizen driven transferable and transformative digital health), aims to advance the previously implemented H2020 digital health platform ‘ProACT’ (Integrated Technology Systems for ProACTive Patient Centred). SEURO will evaluate the ProACT platform via large scale pragmatic randomised controlled trials in Ireland, Belgium and Sweden. Led by Dr John Dinsmore, it represents the 3rd successful Horizon 2020 award that he has secured in the area of digital health technology at TCPHI.