On the 5th of April, EFA Project Manager Giuseppe De Carlo attended in Bratislave the funders meeting of ERACoSysMed (the ERANET on System Medicine) as a representative of the Scientific Advisory Board. ERACoSysMed is the first Systems Medicine oriented ERA-NET under Horizon 2020. These ‘ERA-NETs’ are composed of those countries that wish to support together projects that show how systems medicine can deliver better and more effective patient centred care.
During the meeting, we discussed how the contribution of patients organisations to the preparation of a research project proposal is key to ensure the project relevance for patients and outcomes to address patient needs. To this extent, we gave an overview of EFA’s contribution to Systems Medicine, through our participation in EU-funded projects such as MeDALL, U-BIOPRED and AirPROM and we gave an overview of the potential roles of individual patients and patients organisation in the formulation of project proposals and in the implementation of project activities. As an example, we presented our experience with the U-BIOPRED Patient Input Platform and EFA’s role of coordinator of the Advisory Patient Forum within myAirCoach.
ERACoSysMed funding agencies will now discuss how to accommodate the patient perspective in the next call for proposals.