EU project shares best practices at Brussels workshop

(Brussels, 17.10.2019) A consortium of seven leading European university hospitals and AQuAS, the Agency for Health Quality and Assessment of Catalonia, is working to develop and accelerate cross-border procurement of innovation in health care. The project, called “PIPPI” (Platform for Procurement of Innovation and Innovation of Procurement) and funded through the EU Horizon 2020 programme, recently contributed insights to an EU workshop on best practices of innovation procurement.

Coordinator Martina Ahlberg, of Karolinska University Hospital, presented project details to an audience of industry and health care experts. Ahlberg gave an overview of the key components of PIPPI, including the main goal of building an international Community of Practice (CoP) to advance the use of innovation procurement in health care.

“Pre-commercial procurement and public private initiatives will drive digital innovations in health care. Within our PIPPI project, leading European University Hospitals will be able to purchase technology even before it is developed. The EU workshop on innovation procurement was very valuable to have an opportunity to share and gain knowledge, experience and learnings from so many different and EU experts on the core of what PIPPI is building, a CoP that can make available, gather and share innovations in digital health care,” said Ahlberg regarding her participation in the workshop.

The workshop, hosted by the European Commission’s Directorates-General for Research and Innovation and for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (CNECT), focused on cross-border innovation procurement in health. Approximately 100 participants saw presentations on innovation procurement instruments such as Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) and Public Procurement of Innovative solutions (PPI) and new PCP & PPI funding opportunities for 2020. Participants discussed best practices of designing and implementing successful projects and networked with the relevant and representative audience of procurers, potential suppliers, regional or umbrella organisations, and regulators.

“The sharing of knowledge and experience from EU staff as well as PCP and PPI projects across Europe is a great inspiration and shows how shared knowledge can make 1+1 become 3,” Ahlberg concluded.

King’s College Hospital hosts biannual PIPPI meeting in London

(London, 25.09.2019) Following face-to-face meetings of the PIPPI consortium in Vienna and Rotterdam, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London had the pleasure of hosting the September PIPPI group meeting.

Ref. Ares(2019)7376831 – 29/11/2019

The meeting saw progress made on several fronts, including work on stakeholder identification and engagement planning as well as collating input from all partner hospitals and synthesizing it into a usable format for the development and establishment of the Community of Practice. Visitors to King’s also heard from Consultant Neurologist Dr. James Teo, who presented on the Cogstack project, which is an innovative solution that uses existing health care data and artificial intelligence to provide insights for clinicians and managers in order to better meet the needs of patients.

Innovations to address clinical challenges

The Pan-European PIPPI project brings together relevant stakeholders, including hospitals and research institutions, industry partners, health professionals and patients, to identify digital health care needs and develop innovative solutions for said needs. The platform combines expertise on digital health care, patient-centred care and supply- and demand-side procurement to jointly address these unmet clinical challenges.

The following institutions are involved in the project: Karolinska University Hospital (Sweden), Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam (Netherlands), San Raffaele Hospital (Italy), Medical University of Vienna (Austria), Vall d’Hebron Barcelona Hospital Campus (Spain), Agency for Health Quality and Assessment of Catalonia (Spain), Helsinki University Hospital (Finland) and King’s College Hospital (England).

PIPPI is funded by Horizon2020, the European Union’s Research Framework Programme. The project began in December 2018 and runs until 2021.

More information at www.PIPPI-project.eu.

Contact: martina.ahlberg@sll.se (project coordinator), tanja.stamm@meduniwien.ac.at (project communication lead), margaret.andrews@meduniwien.ac.at (newsletter signup)