e-Care Leading Group

2nd Meeting : 11 April 2011, Lausanne - EPFL

MISSION STATEMENT

For more information, do not hesitate to contact Coralie Riou:

 coralie.riou@adebag.org

Tel: +33(0)4 76 54 95 63

Context

We will teach you nothing saying that today the healthcare sector is facing increased costs due to the aging population and the raise of the chronic diseases. So, the trend is to optimize the care cycle and to make patients stay at home.

That is why the strategic focus for our “Autonomy & Healthcare” network is “e-Care” that is to say, the convergence of ICT and medical devices for the autonomy and care at home with a multidisciplinary approach. “ICT & Care” represents the future market which will enable people to have a better quality of life and which will bring the solution to decrease the healthcare costs.

Mission & Objectives

We want to build this network gathering industry, research, end-users organizations and the medico-social professionals. Indeed we are convinced that to move forward the field of the “ICT & Care” must have a transversal approach taking into account :

• The human and social sciences aspects which are very important for the acceptability by the patients but also for defining the needs of users and professionals.

• The market which must be created. Solutions have to be found out for setting up the good business model, getting the right funding, dealing with the complexity of the medico-social system…

In consequence, trans-national cooperation is a good solution to overcome together these identified barriers and to enhance the competitiveness of our companies, especially our SMEs.

In order to reach our goal, we want to establish a trans-national leading group whose mission will be :

• Bring your expertise in order to identify the strategic topics in the wide field of the technology for autonomy and care

• Be the entry point for your personal network to the Alps Bio Cluster network

• Support the Alps Bio Cluster team during the organization of events : promotion, involvement of participants…

• Animate and boost the network by fostering trans-national cooperation

The Alps Bio Cluster leading group will not only be trans-national but also multidisciplinary. So it will be composed of experts from companies, academics, research institutes, medico-social field, end-users organisations… The innovation will reach the market only by taking into account the different cultures and features of the European medico-social systems. The establishment of the leading group will thus play the role of facilitator representing the point of view of each European country.

REPORT OF THE FIRST MEETING

The first meeting of the « e-Care » leading group took place on July 7th during the event in Grenoble. It gathered big companies, SMEs, universities, research institutes.

Following to the fruitful discussions and exchanges, an action plan was defined with 4 working axis:

• Set up a European open platform interoperable whose objective will be to enable the companies work together on common European infrastructures (experience exchange, technological integration, normalization...)
• Access to the market

Two challenges for accessing the market were highlighted:

- How to reach a strong dissemination, what is the good level of deployment: regional, national, European?

- Experimentations are carried out but did not reach the industrial phase. The deployment at the large scale is necessary to reduce production costs and make the product and service affordable for the patient.

This working axis will aim at overcoming these challenges

• EU lobbying: to have a bottom-up approach and lobbying at the European level for next European calls
  

• Project engineering: to set up European collaborative project. We are currently working on the FP7, ICT call 7 and more particularly on challenge 5: ICT for Health, Ageing Well, Inclusion and Governance. More Information.