The main goal of the PALANTE project is to empower patients allowing them to make informed decisions about their health and take an active role in their care and collaborate effectively with their healthcare team thanks to the use of information and communication technologies. Patient empowerment reinforces healthcare quality and improves efficiency of healthcare systems and thus counters the trend of increasing healthcare costs. This is why patient empowerment is a priority area of EU policy.

Building on already existing e-health platforms and services in the 9 participating regions, the PALANTE project focuses on the implementation, scaling up and optimisation of 7 demonstration pilots based on the concept of secure and user friendly online access by citizens to their medical/health data. Two sites will allow an in-depth look into how patient access is already working. All pilot sites and on-going projects cover a wide range of services with different levels of complexity and a different number of patients, addressing different levels of empowerment. Altogether, 5 pilots address treatment of chronic diseases with applications of ICT integrated in chronic disease management support. Empirica is the partner leading evaluation in the project. It takes care of assessing the impact of eHealth in each site using a multi-method multi stakeholder approach.