Most models of care across the EU focus on a single disease approach and are not adaptive to the needs of people with multiple chronic conditions. People with multi morbidities and healthcare professionals often report their current care as repetitive, poorly integrated and inconvenient. SEURO aims to improve this situation by optimising and scaling up use of the digital health platform ‘ProACT’ for use across EU countries.
The SEURO project follows on from a previous Horizon 2020 project called ProACT (Grant No 689996, please see: proact2020.eu). The aim of ProACT was to develop and evaluate (at a proof of concept level) a digital platform to integrate a wide variety of new and existing technologies to improve and advance home-based self-management and integrated care for older adults (over 65 years) with multimorbidity, including associated co-morbidities (focus was on diabetes, chronic heart disease/failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)).
ProACT sought to address for 4 key areas within the project aim:
- To facilitate people with multi morbidities to proactively manage their health and care
- To advance new healthcare models that are flexible and person-centric
- To improve the effectiveness of services and care delivery for patients with multimorbidity
- To advance home-based healthcare and use of ICT-AT for management of multimorbidity
This was successfully achieved with trial outcomes showing significant benefits of implementing the ProACT platform and associated assistive technologies for people with multi morbidity and their care network. As a result, the SEURO project will continue this work and further develop the ProACT platform with 3 new implementation and transferability support tools (ProTransfer, ProBCF and ProInsight), which will be evaluated with the ProACT platform via Effectiveness Implementation Hybrid (EIH) trials (Ireland, Belgium and Sweden) and an Inductive-Simultaneous Exploratory (ISE trial) with older adults with multi-morbidities and their care networks.
Potential Impact
Currently there are approximately 50 million people in Europe with multimorbidity. Poorly integrated and coordinated care for multimorbidity has a range of negative consequences for the health and quality of life of the person and their family carers. Using the ProACT platform yielded a number of benefits for people living with multi morbidity and their families including:
- Empowering people with multi morbidities to actively manage their own health
- Providing information and guidance on how individuals can improve their health
- Encouraging the adoption of behaviours which improve health
By scaling up the ProACT platform, the SEURO project can create benefits for a wider cohort of people with multi morbidities and their families.
Healthcare systems
The ProACT platform shows evidence of improved healthcare co-ordination related to multi morbid chronic diseases. The SEURO project will explore ways in which the ProACT platform can be efficiently integrated and implemented by health systems and organisations. Some ways will include:
- Providing guidance to healthcare organisations on how to effectively implement ProACT
- Improving healthcare organisations capacity to adopt digital health and related assistive technologies
- Optimising transferability of the ProACT platform across diverse EU health systems
By scaling up the ProACT platform, SEURO has potential to improve the efficiency and efficacy of health systems in managing multi morbid chronic diseases. The Covid-19 pandemic has also highlighted the importance of developing well-integrated eHealth within health systems.
Core Objectives
- Adapt and test a transferability self-assessment tool to evaluate organisational and local/regional readiness for digital health implementation
- Evaluate a Behavioural Change Framework to maximise effective user engagement and scalability of a digital health solution in a real life setting
- Investigate the transferability, sustainability and scalability of the ProACT platform for use across Europe
- Develop a systematic approach for evaluating and assessing organisational/local/regional preparedness for implementing digital integrated care systems
- Enhance capacity of the ProACT platform for managing multimorbidity at a wider scale by developing a data analytical tool
- Validate and explore ProACT compatibility with existing requirements and constraints of local/regional/national and international procurement processes
- Develop clear exploitation and dissemination plans
Project and Consortium
The project is coordinated by Dr.John Dinsmore in Trinity College Dublin, involves 12 partners across five EU Member states (Ireland, Belgium, Italy, Sweden and Austria)
SEURO brings together a consortium of academic/research institutions, Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs), health service providers, EU networks, and multinational corporations
The project will take place over 36 months (May 2021 – May 2024)
The project was awarded €3.9 million by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Framework
More info: https://seuro2020.eu