Project description
Novel assessment framework for digital health technologies
The digital transition has brought about numerous opportunities and breakthroughs across various sectors. One notable advancement in the health sector is the emergence of digital health technologies (DHT), which enable improved health monitoring and assessment from a distance, leading to more consistent care. However, despite their potential benefits, many DHTs have struggled to gain adoption by large organisations or stakeholders. The EU-funded ASSES-DHT project aims to address this challenge by increasing the adoption of trustworthy and beneficial DHTs throughout Europe, thereby enhancing health outcomes for many patients. The project will develop a novel framework for assessing DHTs that is suitable for European Healthcare Technology Assessments (HTA). Additionally, it will collaborate with policymakers, stakeholders, and patients to facilitate improvements in DHT adoption and use.
Objective
ASSESS-DHT will increase the adoption of trustworthy and effective Digital Health Technologies (DHT) across Europe, enabling a more coherent digital single market, for health systems and patients to access DHT from all over Europe and giving industry a European market. We will develop a new assessment framework, beyond the existing models, capable of uniform HTA adoption across Europe, addressing new assessment challenges in Digital Therapeutics, AI and telehealth. Our consortium comprises 4 HTA bodies, the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, 5 academic and not for profit organisations with expertise in EU Regulation, DHT development and assessment methodologies, data protection, data quality, interoperability and cybersecurity. Patients and health professionals are included through the International Diabetes Federation and European Society of Cardiology. We include the DHT industry through companies with products for us to assess through a formal methodology mimicking actual HTA assessments – 3 as partners, some through an open call and industry-wide consultation via DIGITAL EUROPE. We will engage healthcare payers and ministries through our Advisory Board. We will co-create our overarching assessment framework with specialised pathways for different categories of DHT specified through a novel evidence-based typology. We will cater for phased adoption (going beyond fast track models like DiGA), complex life-cycles, iteratively developed AI, consolidated in a comprehensive HTA assessment manual plus specific guides in topics like cybersecurity. We will develop a sustainable repository containing the ASSESS-DHT framework, pathways and unambiguous criteria, a semantically searchable evidence library, checklists and tools to support companies with evidence generation, evidence of health system value from DHT, and online communities of practice.
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HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
53111 Bonn
Germany
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.