Project Summary

Issue: Changing the care process is vital to maintain high quality care in heart failure (HF). HF is one of the most prevalent chronic diseases, affecting 3,600,000 people in NWE today and >5,000,000 in 2025 due to population ageing. HF care is expensive (>3,600 €/y pp) and provided by healthcare professionals only. The burden of HF on healthcare labour and costs is unsustainable. Patient self-care may solve the problem but is unsupported in the value chain. Current HF-eHealth products do not replace care, are stand-alone and add-ons to standard care rather than supporting patients in self-care. Next-gen eHealth providing decision support and actively involving HF-patients will reduce costs (50%) and improve quality of care. This provides huge business potential for the healthcare value chain.

Change: the PASSION-HF consortium will jointly develop an integrated eHealth product called “Abby” enabling self-care of chronic HF including self-prescription of medication. It will include novel features such as a decision support engine, interactive physician avatar interface, serious gaming tools and self-learning feedback system. PASSION-HF will exploit this business potential by bringing the current TRL4 eHealth product to a TRL7 personalized web-based application within 43 months. This leads to an increased number of enterprises supported to introduce new healthcare products.

Outputs: 4 supported SMEs introducing 1 new to the market HF eHealth product in cooperation with research institutions, 10 jobs in the healthcare sector and the establishment of 1 new transnational innovation network. Long-term effects: By year 5, Abby at TRL 9, >20,000 patients in performing self-care in NWE with Abby, 70% treatment decisions by Abby, >16 SMEs supporting the treatment process, costs app. 1,800 €/y pp. By year 10, Abby operational, >225,000 patients in NWE, 80% treatment decisions by Abby, >30 SMEs supporting HF-treatment process, costs app. 1,000 €/y pp.