Usual diabetes care
Diabetes mellitus is a chronic, life-long, rising and very broad disease accompanied by many co-morbid conditions, complications and stages. Medical services for diabetes are available in all public and private sectors of healthcare systems, numerous medications have been developed, most importantly the body hormone insulin, and commercial support services back care providers’ efforts with products adapted to the needs of those living with the disease. Diabetes is also intensely researched and subject to health reporting in many industrialised countries, the majority of which also have national diabetes guidelines in place.

Diabetes represents worldwide nevertheless an increasing burden on the cost of health care systems and the care offered is far from perfect. Usual care in most regions of Europe reacts to incidents rather than actively managing care. Diabetes care is also far from being fully integrated and further set back by the lack of interoperability across healthcare systems. The quality of many commercial internet-based services remains an issue and the focus on diabetes as a disesease often fails to properly address social aspects in patients’ lives, such as retirement issues and the compatibility of diabetes and working.

Bringing change
Public procurers in ProEmpower will address these challenges over the 42 months of the project, procuring a disease self-management solution that will make person-centred care a reality. The project assumes that the quality of medical decisions can be enhanced by personalised decision support tools that summarise patient clinical characteristics, treatment preference and ancillary data at the point of care. Early detection, personal decision support, self management and peer support are to be delivered from a platform with full interoperable and secure access to the necessary devices and health records. In this way a quality culture in healthcare will be fostered and learning healthcare systems will be made reality.

Fully rolled out in the four countries, enabled by procurers with the authority and capacity in their countries and regions, ProEmpower will serve 12 million diabetes patients. Reductions in diabetes-related death, amputation, blindness and renal failure promise cost relief of  53 billion over 7 years in the four countries. Suppliers can expect a turnover of  5 billion a year. Proven ability to cover the four different health systems promises ProEmpower suppliers easy entry onto other EU markets and beyond, a very strong contribution to overcoming fragmentation of demand and fostering the global market.

Our role
empirica will guide the development of ProEmpower’s co-design and change management framework early into the project and will continue to offer its support in ensuring all relevant requirements relating to the specific characteristics of key user groups (diabetes patients, informal caregiver, health care professionals) are met to the fullest feasible extent. As part of this effort, empirica will contribute to identifying, systematising and documenting for the suppliers the requirements of each service delivery organisation and the legal and regulatory factors in the countries involved in the project. Empirica will also support ProEmpower with estamating the effects of ist main impact areas, modelling them against the population of diabetes type 2 patients in the countries involved. The ASSIST approach for e-service deployment in health, care and ageing will be used throughout ProEmpower to ensure that economically viable and effective outcomes are reached. Furthermore, empirica will be in charge of the project’s dissemination strategy and activities.

The project has received funding from the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union under grant agreement n-°72740.