The Health and Care Cluster was created in 2019, as a healthcare-related activity of the Open Dei project, and was facilitated by EHTEL. Over a three-year period, the Cluster gathered together 14 Large Scale Pilot projects. These digital health services, platforms, pilots and projects had two themes in common: either to support Active and Healthy Living policies or to implement AI in healthcare.

Here are some facts and figures from the Cluster:

The Cluster

What did the Cluster do?

Thanks to the support of the eHealth, Well-Being and Ageing Unit of the European Commission’s DG Connect and UNINOVA, in Portugal, EHTEL continued to facilitate the work of the Cluster for some time. The Cluster’s work programme was renewed, and had the ambition to become a sustainable collaboration mechanism dedicated to European Union (EU)-funded projects.

The Cluster’s objective was to maximise EU-funded pilots and projects’ impact by supporting them in developing synergies. For example, it enabled the pilots and projects to: - benefit from other’s experiences and achievements, including in the early stages of project development, - concentrate their efforts on specific areas of interest, - create greater impact around their results.

What enabled the Cluster to be successful?

The Cluster developed a win-win approach for EU-funded projects. It enabled the projects to develop synergies and to build their team efforts together. It paid attention to the following four principles:

• Clustering: The Cluster grouped the projects according to criteria that were technical (e.g., reference architecture, building blocks) and either clinical or societal (e.g., use cases) with a view to enabling their concrete collaboration.
• Identifying other added-value projects: The Cluster pinpointed other projects – which had early inputs on specific topics with important added-value – and invited them to share their expertise with projects in the Cluster or sub-Cluster.
• Identifying topics where a cooperative consolidation of knowledge can be achieved: The Cluster undertook this identification of topics with a view to improving dissemination and exploitation.
• Supporting the cross-participation of projects to thematic workshops: The Cluster organised thematic workshops run by different, individual projects.

What was planned for the future?

By 2024, most of the current projects that were members of the Cluster no longer received European funding or came towards their completion date. Afterwards, the Cluster continued to support the exploitation of the projects’ results. In particular, it helped to sustain the deployment sites which maintained the piloted digital health services with their own resources.

Later, the EU’s Horizon Europe programme granted funding to at least 20 projects on digital health. The future projects were invited to consider joining the Cluster, with two aims in mind: to benefit from the lessons learned by their predecessors, and to obtain guidance on how to avoid ‘re-inventing the wheel’.

Projects like COMFORTage, a “virtualised, AI-based, healthcare platform", can also be seen as a kind of “second generation” of the Cluster. 

For details about why and how new projects can join the Cluster and continue with Cluster-like activities, please contact EHTEL Secretariat member, Luc Nicolas: luc.nicolas@ehtel.eu.

If you’re interested in other alliances and partnerships that EHTEL has got engaged with, see here.