The Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) is a public-private partnership (PPP) between the European Union and the European life science industries, and these partners sit on our Governing Board. Its main objective is to translate healthcare research and innovation into tangible benefits for patients and society. It is also looking for Europe to become a reference in the fields of interdisciplinary, sustainable and patient-centered health research.

Any organisation established in the EU or a country associated to Horizon Europe is eligible to receive IHI funding. In practice, IHI funding primarily supports the participation in its projects of organisations like universities, research organisations, patient organisations, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and mid-sized companies. Depending on the type of call for proposals, larger companies may also be eligible to receive IHI funding. Details of who can receive funding is spelt out in the call texts.

Contributing to IHI: industry partners and contributing partners

Large companies that are members of the IHI industry partners contribute to the programme, primarily through 'in-kind' contributions (e.g. their researchers' time, laboratories, data, compounds). They can also make cash contributions. IHI contributing partners provide resources to IHI in the same way.

At least 45% of each project's budget has to come from industry partner / contributing partner contributions (in exceptional cases, a lower percentage may be allowed).

Explanation of this specific topic

The amount of health data generated by citizens themselves is rapidly increasing. Such data includes patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), patient preference information (PPI), and patient-reported experience measures (PREMs), as well as other digital health data/digital biomarkers. While the potential for these data to be harnessed to improve individual healthcare is enormous, these data are often fragmented among multiple providers, so that neither the citizen, nor the healthcare ecosystem have a comprehensive overview, and therefore it is very challenging to fully use these data to provide reliable evidence for decisionmakers, and to improve health outcomes.

Research and innovation (R&I) actions to be supported under this topic will aim to address this challenge by:

• Developing a framework to integrate patient input and patient-generated data for use in decision making (regulatory, health economic evaluation, reimbursement, healthcare programme design, tailored prescription of therapies, and technology development), benefit-risk evaluation and value assessment of integrated healthcare solutions.1 Applicants should build on existing frameworks where appropriate and appropriately address ethics considerations.
• Implement several use cases to support and demonstrate the use of the framework, focusing on using patient input and patient-generated evidence to address challenges that are not adequately addressed by other initiatives.
• Facilitating multi-stakeholder access to patient inputs and patient-generated health data such that actionable harmonised data can be used for quality decision making.
• Comparing/contrasting the properties of the three types of patient input (PROMs, PPI, PREMs), identify differences and opportunities for integrated/complementary use.
• Developing an approach or approaches to integrating PROMs, PPI, and PREMs data into the design of core outcomes sets, end-to-end patient treatment pathways, clinical decision support systems, and treatment guidelines. The core outcome sets used within the project should be made available more widely where possible.

Applicants are expected to seek engagement with regulators where relevant (e.g. through the EMA Innovation Task Force, scientific advice) and consider allocating appropriate resources to explore synergies with other relevant initiatives and projects.

In case of interest, both as possible coordinator or partner,  please click on "m'interessa" and we will contact you.