The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) has approved a 2o.6 million euros project to create an unprecedented, standardised data governance and infrastructure system across Europe to incorporate patients‘ opinions and preferences in decisions affecting their individual health and those of the entire community. Lead by the pharmaceutical company Takeda and coordinated by Vienna Medical University, H2O aims to improve health outcomes for patients, enhance health research prospects and foster a value based approach in health care systems. 23 partners from the public and private sector will collaborate in the next five years to define, design and implement a patient-centered, ethically and legally sound framework of Observatories.
The project will initially focus on setting up health outcomes observatories in four countries (Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and Austria) covering three disease areas: diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, and cancer. In the longer term, H2O plans to roll out this framework of Observatories to other regions and countries in Europe and beyond to cover other disease areas. This innovative approach will imply that, going forward, treatment decisions will be informed in a systematic, standardised way both by clinical and patient reported outcomes measures. Moreover, this aggregated data will also form the basis of research into new, innovative, evidence-based treatments.
IMI is the world’s biggest public-private partnership (PPP) in the life sciences. It is a partnership between the European Union (represented by the European Commission) and the European pharmaceutical industry (represented by EFPIA, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations). T
