“Pre-commercial Procurement of innovative ICT-enabled integrated care solutions to advance multidisciplinary health and care for patients with chronic heart failure”
On 17-18th February 2021, empirica celebrated with seven project partners the launch of INCAREHEART. Coordinated by the region Jämtland Härjedalen, the pre-commercial procurement project brings together public procurers across five European countries to tackle existing challenges in chronic heart failure care.
The common challenge
Around 15 million people suffer from heart failure in Europe. Chronic heart failure is associated with high mortality rates and unplanned hospitalisations, contributing to substantial health system costs. Patients have complex health and care needs that necessitate combined efforts across settings, healthcare providers and professionals. However, patients and their (informal) caregivers face significant barriers to a continuous and integrated care pathway. Currently fragmented and uncoordinated service delivery within and between healthcare settings results in inefficient und lower quality care that can negatively impact both patients’ and carers’ well-being.
The aim
Over the course of 44 months, five public procurers will address this care gap by jointly procuring R&D for an ICT-enabled integrated care solution which will advance patient-centred, coordinated health and care provision for chronic heart failure. Special focus will be given to improving care transitions and care planning, facilitating efficient collaboration of multidisciplinary care teams and patients, providing tailored secondary prevention, as well as enabling patient empowerment, shared decision-making and disease self-management. Through comprehensive monitoring and securely leveraging data sources, the INCAREHEART platform will also support early diagnosis and detection of complications and co-morbidities. The consortium expects that ICT-enabled integrated care can improve patients’ personal health outcomes and experience through a more effective and efficient healthcare management and provision.
Once fully rolled out in the five procurer countries (Sweden, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Turkey), INCAREHEART will serve 1,320,000 heart failure patients.
Our role
From the beginning onwards and until the end of the project, empirica will lead Work Package 1 on INCAREHEART’s co-design and change management framework, ensuring that needs of key users (heart failure patients, informal caregivers, health and social care professionals) are addressed. While doing so, organisational, technical, legal and regulatory requirements for service delivery at pilot site and country-level will also be elicited. Further, empirica will guide the evaluation and impact assessment as part of Work Package 7. In this effort, empirica will support the development of an assessment and selection framework of tenderers, the evaluation of pilot outcomes based on a common set of defined indicators, as well as modelling and projecting large-scale impact scenarios based on the ASSIST approach for e-service deployment in health, care and ageing.
The project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement n°965134.
Project facts
- Project acronym: INCAREHEART
- Start date: 1 February 2021
- Duration: 44 months
- Coordination: Region Jämtland Härjedalen
INCAREHEART partners
Region Jämtland Härjedalen (Sweden)
Universita Degli Studi Di Napoli Federico II (Italy)
Region of Central Macedonia (Greece)
Irmandade Da Santa Casa Da Misericordia Da Amadora IPSS (Portugal)
Turkiye Cumhuriyeti Saglik Bakanligi (Turkey)
Stichting International Foundation for Integrated Care (The Netherlands)
Ticbiomed (Spain)
empirica Gesellschaft für Kommunikations-und Technologieforschung mbH (Germany)
