BRUSSELS, BELGIUM - (HealthTech Wire / News) - On 30th November, Renewing Health will hold a Midterm Workshop in the prestigious venue of the European Economic and Social Committee. It aims to share information about this ambitious Project which is co-funded by the European Union under the CIP ICT PSP (Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme), 9 Regions of 9 Member States, and some NGOs. It also offers the opportunity for the eHealth community to go beyond the geographical coverage of this project, and listen to other relevant experiences of deploying eHealth services such as that of Kaiser Permanente in the U.S.A.
- Renewing Health holds a Midterm Workshop in the prestigious venue of the European Economic and Social Committee
- It aims to share information about this ambitious Project which is co-funded by the European Union under the CIP ICT PSP, 9 Regions of 9 Member States, and some NGOs
- It offers the opportunity for the eHealth community to go beyond the geographical coverage of this project, and listen to other relevant experiences of deploying eHealth services
Renewing Health is the largest project ever launched in Europe for evaluating the impact of ICT, and in particular of the so called Personal Health Systems, in the management of chronic patients in home settings. It addresses a major societal challenge in the Union, not only because chronic diseases are typical of old age, but also because their incidence and cost for society are rapidly growing in Europe and beyond.
Even if Personal Health Systems have been in use for a number of years, they have been mostly trialled on small numbers of patients, for short periods of time, and with a focus almost totally concentrated on the clinical outcomes of their use. Renewing Health uses the randomised controlled trials (RCT) methodology, with almost 8.000 patients recruited for the intervention group and 18 pilots running in parallel in 9 European regions, and a total duration just short of 4 years. It has the potential to provide, finally, the hard evidence that decision makers are waiting for to reorient investment towards ICT. (More at www.renewinghealth.eu/health-services).
Renewing Health has adopted a multidisciplinary evaluation methodology which will take into consideration much more than just the clinical outcome of the trials. The economic and organisational impact of these services will equally be assessed; this is of particular importance these days because in the current gloomy economic scenario, the economics of innovation cannot be ignored. Likewise for the quality of life of chronic patients, and for acceptance by the different categories of users: patients, relatives and other informal carers as well as healthcare professionals.
The evaluation methodology of choice is MAST, a methodology developed under contract with the European Commission. MAST makes it possible to compare and aggregating data from different projects with similar interventions, and is attracting major interest outside the Renewing Health Consortium because of the demand so far unsatisfied for a robust methodology which increases the base of evidence in favour of the large-scale uptake of home monitoring for the sustainable management of chronic patients.
The most rigorous RCT design, widely accepted by the scientific community, has been selected for the trials in such a way that the results of the Project will be sound and unchallengeable. This ensures, among other things, that external factors such as changes in chronic disease treatments or in the organisations of the healthcare systems, which might occur during the trials, do not affect the evaluation.
The Midterm Workshop will also represent an opportunity to present some of the pilots which are underway in the context of Renewing Health. Their characteristics and differences are well representative of the variety of situations that are encountered in the European Union, and of the interest of learn more from one another and exploit the cultural richness that it encompass.
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Source: Renewing Health
