Official launch of SEURO digital health programme for older adults

Posted on: 27 April 2022

The official launch has taken place at Trinity College Dublin this week of the three-year SEURO digital health programme.

The Trinity Centre for Practice and Healthcare Innovation is co-ordinating SEURO, an ambitious EU project to support older adults self-managing with multiple chronic health conditions. It targets Europe’s 50 million multi-morbid patients.

The consortium involves 12 partners across five EU states.

‘SEURO’ (Scaling EUROpean citizen driven transferable and transformative digital health), aims to advance the previously implemented H2020 digital health platform ‘ProACT’ (Integrated Technology Systems for ProACTive Patient Centred).

SEURO will evaluate the ProACT platform via large scale pragmatic randomised controlled trials in Ireland, Belgium and Sweden.

Led by Dr John Dinsmore, it represents the 3rd successful Horizon 2020 award that he has secured in the area of digital health technology.

The SEURO project has been awarded €3.9 million under the European Commission Horizon 2020 ‘EU Framework for Research and Innovation’.

SEURO targets Europe’s 50 million multimorbid patients to proactively self-manage from home to help off-set the annual €700 billion cost of chronic disease management.

The consortium brings together a consortium network of academic/research institutions, small to medium enterprises, health service providers, EU networks and multinational corporations.

Overall the aims of the project are to:

• Improve and scale up delivery of the ProACT platform, a digital integrated care solution to support older adults self-managing at home with multiple chronic diseases (multimorbidity) supported by their care network (healthcare professionals, caregivers, pharmacists etc).

• Develop three new digital assessment tools to help healthcare organisations and services advance their readiness to successfully adopt digital health solutions in practice.

In Ireland, outcomes from the previous ProACT H2020 project suggest use of the platform could conservatively reduce hospital admissions by 30% per annum for older adults with multimorbidity (estimated at 508,299) providing a cost-saving in the region of €439 million to the Irish health system.

It is this potential which has seen the European Commission endorsement of SEURO to help scale up testing of the platform. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has also highlighted the importance of developing wellintegrated eHealth within health systems. The SEURO project will also ensure that Ireland has capacity to keep pace with developments in this area and deliver transformation healthcare and industry supported research that will establish Ireland as an EU leader in this field.

ENDS