empirica is lending its expertise in socio-economic modelling and innovation management to a new in silico modeling initiative, Back-UP, launched at the beginning of 2018.

Back-UP: Personalised Prognostic Models to Improve Well-being and Return to Work After Neck and Lower Back Pain – receives funding from the European Union H2020 programme. It is an ambitious project with thirteen European partners and over 5,1M budget. Back-UP will create a prognostic model to support more effective and efficient management of neck and lower back pain, based on the digital representation of multidimensional clinical information, and in-silico assessments of possible interventions. The AI platform will allow clinicians and occupational health insurances to estimate the probability and course of patient improvement as well as the risk of recurrence, enable more personalised and targeted therapeutic plans, and speed up time for reintegration into the work place.

Neck and lower back pain is a leading cause of years lived with disability in Europe and worldwide. About 70% of all adults experience neck and/or lower back pain at some point in their lives, and both conditions are among the top ten in terms of overall disease burden expressed as disability adjusted life years. Low back pain is the leading cause of work absence in Europe, and it causes an enormous burden on individuals, industry and society.

Next to developing an economic model for the European-wide exploitation and innovation diffusion of project outcomes, empirica is also responsible for designing and implementing the dissemination strategy.