Introduction- EIT Health is calling for activities for our portfolio in 2022 and beyond! The projects must be aligned with one or more  EIT Health Strategic Goals and one or more Focus Areas:

• Strategic Goals: 1. Promoting better health of citizens; 2. Strengthening healthcare systems in Europe, 3. Contributing to a sustainable health economy in Europe.
• Focus Areas: 1. Towards Health Continuum Care Pathways; 2. Bringing Care Home; 3. Creating the Enabling Environment for Healthcare Transformation; 4. From the Workplace to the Health Place; 5. Harnessing the Power of Real‐World Data; 6. Fostering Healthy Lives by Introducing Behavioral Change.

Activities are expected to contribute to the achievement of widespread, demonstrable socio-economic improvements to society. For this reason, special consideration should be given to:

• Involvement of citizens and patients in the co-creation of activities, and outreach to citizens and patients with information and knowledge generated by or about activities.
• Outcomes that matter most to citizens and patients, aiming beyond the clinical end points, to account for patients' symptom burden, the functional impact of a treatment and health-related quality of life.
• Compliance with ethical, legal and social principles, such as the diversity of participants, consideration of gender differences in research & innovation and the need for accessibility of digital and physical spaces for people with disabilities.

Important considerations on Co-Funding: All projects are encouraged to contribute as much co-funding as is feasible. In the Business Plan 2022, EIT Health will have to reach a minimum co-funding rate of 20%, corresponding to a maximum reimbursement rate of 80%. - This requirement means that 20% of costs must be covered by the Partnership and the EIT Health organisation (HQ and regional Innovation Hubs/InnoStars) and 80% of costs will be covered by EIT. For the Innovation portfolio (meaning all innovation activities together) the co-funding rate is set to 30% (= 70% reimbursement rate). 

Call Objectives- The goal is to build a strategic portfolio of Innovation activities that are aligned with EIT Health objectives to improve patient and/or system outcomes, and deliver a commercial return and health-system savings. To achieve this, starting in 2022, EIT Health seeks to support the following three types of Innovation projects, which we expect to be balanced within the selected activities:

• Partner-driven projects develop products and/or services that will generate revenues and costs savings when introduced in the market.
• Start-up-driven projects develop products and/or services that will generate revenues and costs savings when introduced in the market and offer a model where partners and start-up companies can collaborate to accelerate innovation uptake through the implementation of the Start-up Amplifier instrument, (see Annex 3, Section 1 for more details).
• High Value Care projects (HVC projects) focus on transformations in healthcare systems and organisations, seeking to improve health outcomes with no technology development. The emphasis is on both value (improving health outcomes that matter most to patients) and reimbursement (paying for the outcomes that we aim to have). HVC projects should reflect principles defined through the notion of Value Based Health Care (VBHC). Therefore, a set of supporting activities - such as workshops, an international conference with VBHC leaders and development of a repository of referent cases - will be developed in the framework of the EIT Health High Value Care Forum. A pilot project will be implemented in 2021 to test the new processes used by the Forum to foster emergence of the best HVC projects, which will be selected amongst the applications to this Call. Indeed, from the group of HVC projects, a subset of projects (those with higher levels of maturity as defined by the scorecard) will be offered the possibility to join the HVC pilot process. Partners will be the ones making the final decision whether they want to join the HVC pilot, which will involve additional feedback opportunities, as well as the possibility to start the project in Q3 2021 instead of Q1 2022 like the regular call projects.

Duration: Up to a maximum of three years.

Budget: Maximum €2.5 million for project duration, with maximum of €850,000 in years one and two, and €800,000 in year three. For Start-up-driven projects, the grant allocated for the start-up applying to the Start-up Amplifier instrument must be in the range of €300,000-€500,000 for the overall project.

Co-funding minimum 20%

Eligibilty

• Proposals must include only Core and/or Associate Partners who have paid their membership fees for the year 2021.
• Proposals must involve partners from a minimum of two regional Innovation Hubs (formerly known as Co-Location Centres) /InnoStars, reflecting a pan-European character (involving at least two independent entities from two different eligible countries).
• Proposals must be led by either an EIT Health Core Partner, Associate Partner or a Linked Third Party.

Deadlines

The submission of each proposal will follow a two-step-approach:

• Submission of an Expression of Interest (EOI): activity leaders must submit an EOI on the Plaza submission system by 13 January 2021, 16:00 CET. Activity Leaders will be informed no later than 22 January 2021 to recommend whether a complete proposal should be submitted or in some cases to group EOI's addressing similar topics to create a complete proposal.
• Submission of Complete Proposal: activity leaders submit a complete proposal on the Plaza submission system using the same ID number from their EOI by 24 March 2021, 16:00 CET.

Evaluation

Remote Evaluations: Each eligible proposal is evaluated by external evaluators based on the criteria described in the relevant sections - Innovation, Education or Business Creation, between 1-20 April 2021. A maximum of 100 points will be awarded by each evaluator during the remote evaluation. The final remote evaluation score will be the average of all remote evaluators' scores. The results of the remote evaluations and invitations for hearings will be issued to the activity leaders on 3 May 2021.

Hearings: The hearings are conducted by an Evaluation Panel. A maximum of 100 points will be awarded from the hearings by each evaluator. The final hearing score will be the average of all hearing evaluator scores.

A maximum of 100 points will be awarded from the hearings by each evaluator. The final hearing score will be the average of all hearing evaluator scores.

In case of interest, please contact lnorton@fsjd.org