CORDIS

TO-REACH is a Coordination and Support Action funded by Horizon 2020 Societal Challenge 1, which started in December 2016 and is coordinated by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (National Institute of Health), Italy.
The main goal of TO-REACH is to prepare a joint European research programme aimed at producing research evidence supporting health care services and systems to become more resilient, effective, equitable, accessible, sustainable and comprehensive (in Europe, and abroad). The Project Consortium brings together 28 Partners that can be clustered around three main types: Governmental and/or Funding Bodies, National Research Organizations, European Level Bodies. The 28 institutions that make up the consortium are located in 20 countries (15 Member States and 5 non EU-Countries such as United-States, Canada, Israel, among others). Over the last decades, European health systems have faced growing common challenges: aging related issues and continuous financial pressures call for innovative solutions on how to organize health care in an equitable and efficient manner. To address this situation there is an urgent need to bring in innovation and research evidence, in order to identify and implement more effective and sustainable ways to organize, manage, finance, and deliver high quality care to all European citizens.

To achieve its central aim of preparing a joint European research program, TO-REACH has two main work streams: 1) To develop, conceptually and methodologically, a research program on cross-border learning from good (or even innovative) models of care and the conditions needed to transfer them to other settings for implementation. 2)To enhance sustainable cooperation between funding bodies as well as their link with other existing or upcoming funders networks in order to facilitate such a joint international research program.

Within these two main strategic work streams described above, TO-REACH will pursue six specific objectives, which will guide the work of six separate but inter-linked Work Packages (Fig. 2): 1.To ensure well-coordinated project governance and project management with respect of contractual commitment through. 2.To identify health current and future health services and systems challenges and priorities by synthesising European and national roadmaps, ongoing research and stakeholder inputs. 3. To develop an analytical framework and provide a knowledge synthesis on the identification of good models of care and the conditions needed for transferring, absorbing, up-scaling and enhancing performance. 4.To enhance sustainable cooperation by research funding bodies and their link with other existing or upcoming funders networks and to prepare a common and sustainable platform for funding organizations. 5.To contribute to research agenda setting at European and Member States’ level by developing a Strategic Research Agenda (SRA). 6.To disseminate and communicate the process and results of TO-REACH both in a targeted and wide manner.

Initial meetings with representatives of EU Member States and of the European Commission to raise awareness about the project were held in the first semester of the project both during the regular Program Committee meetings and at the Council level (Working Party on Public Health at Senior level). Important progresses to meet the aims of the project were evident at the second partners’ meeting. The third partners’ meeting was anticipated by not only the SAC meeting but also the meeting of the Policy Advisory Council (PAC) of the Project in which representatives of Countries involved in the Project met for the first time and provided advices on how better assessing the policy value of the project achievements and their innovative content with respect to current and future policy challenges, both nationally and internationally. As concerns the preparation and the consolidation of the scientific groundwork of the Project which will serve as a background to prepare a future joint research program in the field of comparative health systems and health services research in the post Horizon2020. We therefore identified health current and future health services and systems challenges and priorities that will dominate policy agendas in the next years to come by synthesizing European and national roadmaps, ongoing research and stakeholder inputs. Along with this scientific work, TO-REACH developed the activities aimed to broaden the coalition of committed Member States and funding bodies and to establish a dialogue with other health service-related initiatives, while also preparing for the possibility of a joint research program. In March 2018 an update on the TO-REACH Project and a first outline of the future joint research initiative were presented to the Horizon 2020 Societal Challenge 1 Program Committee Members. Concerning the cooperation with other health-related initiatives, a dedicated joint meeting with the International Consortium for Personalized Medicine (IC PerMed) was organized in Brussels in March 2018 with the aim of exploring possible synergies between TO-REACH and IC PerMed. In Northern Ireland, a National Stakeholder Round Table event was delivered in April 2018, a report from which was prepared and submitted to the WP2 lead. Dissemination activities were also undertaken through the inclusion of articles related to the project in e-newsletter updates, tweets and directed email correspondence.

In the next stage, the mapping of documents identifying current and future health services and systems challenges and priorities that will dominate policy agendas in the next years to come will be completed and verified by national expert consultations in partner countries of the TO-REACH project plus online consultations, available for experts internationally, including all EU Member States. These activities will provide inputs for the development of a Strategic Research Agenda which will provide an overview of the challenges that healthcare systems are facing and of the opportunities to enhance European cooperation and cross-national implementation research, as well as some preliminary recommendations on key research priorities on health systems on a short-, mid- and long-term perspective. Main efforts will be also concentrated in designing and building the framework of a EU joint program to be implemented in the post H2020 and that will focus on comparative health services and systems research. In particular, the future joint research program under development will act as an umbrella initiative which will ensure funding and coordination of projects on health systems and services research in the future. The program will include a focus on implementation, absorptive capacity and transferability of innovative solutions (meaning organizational innovations solutions) and provide an entry point to various health-related datasets for research purposes, but also to gather research outputs and recommendations.