A wide range of proactive research and innovation programmes are on offer under Horizon Europe, Digital Europe, and other European programmes like Erasmus+. EHTEL is keen to see its members become successful contributors to European-wide projects and initiatives. Many consortia prepare project proposals each year.

EHTEL focuses its work on digital health. Three-quarters (75%) of its members have a solid track record in working on or leading European and international projects. Each EHTEL member in a project consortium brings its own skills, expertise, and knowledge from a range of stakeholder fields. Chief among them are digital health implementers.

Matteo Melideo of Engineering explains his digital health ideas to colleagues

The topics covered by project consortia that have EHTEL members in them focus on digital health and data. Specific topics include the European Health Data Space,  artificial intelligence, digital technology, interoperability, governance, digital tools and methods, and capacity-building.  These subjects are often taken up in EHTEL’s annual work programme. Current example projects include: xShare and COMFORTage.

EHTEL’s skills and expertise

Besides the EHTEL team and the EHTEL network’s own in-depth knowledge onspecialist digital and policy topics, contributors bring their own skills to collaboration on proposal-writing. Chief among these skills are:

• Stakeholder engagement – it reinforces the applied use of EHTEL’s wide-ranging member network in many different fields of activity, especially in implementation.
• Facilitation of synergies – it activates concrete collaboration with other initiatives and projects.
• Exploitation – it ensures the concrete use of project results for scientific, societal, and economic purposes.
• Communication – it focuses largely on on projects themselves.
• Dissemination – it centres on projects’ results, their use and uptake.

Each of these five areas of work uses a range of tools, and speaks to a diversity of audiences/readerships.

What EHTEL can offer to project consortia in preparation

EHTEL can help you to:

• Write and prepare your first dissemination plan.
• Stage/phase your communication and dissemination activities throughout the course of your project.
• Identify your key performance indicators for all aspects of your website, social media, events, and communication campaigns, and achieve great scores.
• Focus on the exploitation of your eventual project’s results.
• Apply and use a wide range of methodologies, tools and techniques.
• Position the proposed project and its expected results in the overall digital health policy and implementation landscape.

More specifically:

Every day in every way, EHTEL seeks to involve all project consortium partners in project communication and dissemination, as well as stakeholder and collaboration activities.

Communication campaigns are always supported by the EHTEL multistakeholder network of digital health experts. Today, EHTEL reaches 8,000+ individuals from everywhere in Europe and beyond – they belong to a very wide range of stakeholder groups, but include mostly digital implementers.

EHTEL gets stakeholder groups involved in projects, by getting them represented in many different meetings, groups, presentations, webinars, workshops, and conferences. Many of these activities include groupings of projects – clusters, alliances, partnerships – that complement each other’s work.

On exploitation, EHTEL’s dedicated team concentrates on helping consortia to identify how to sustain, and especially exploit, project results in both the short-term and longer-term. Several of the projects with which it has been involved have experienced considerable success in these fields. Among these OPEN DEI and InteropEHRate have been recognised for their position papers, White Papers, and policy papers. 

EHTEL’s matchmaking for project consortia

Twice a year, EHTEL touches base in person with all its members and conducts a poll to check on members’ primary interests and the kinds of project consortia they want to get involved in.

Match-making at the 2026 EHTEL Symposium in Helsinki, Finland

EHTEL can help consortia to find missing partners for their proposed projects. EHTEL is also often approached with ideas for proposal submissions. As a result, EHTEL is always keen to have these slots filled by knowledgeable EHTEL members.

Consortium experiences

As Matteo Melideo from Engineering, a participant in several successful EHTEL-supported projects, announces: 

“Working with EHTEL from the early days of proposal-writing helped us position well our work on communication, dissemination, and exploitation. Taking InteropEHRate as a good example, this experience has developed soundly for us throughout the duration of the whole project. InteropEHRate project partners have had good coverage in the press and media about their activities, and have experienced great stakeholder involvement. We are now eagerly looking forward to the eventual exploitation of InteropEHRate’s results. The door has opened for us to come into contact with a wide variety of digital health stakeholders, all highly motivated to scale-up digital health throughout Europe.”

Matteo Melideo, Head of IT Systems for Health Research, Engineering Ingegneria Informatics SpA, Italy – InteropEHRate project leader.