The future European Innovation Partnership on ageing will focus on five research and policy areas, its steering group said. The five areas will be: improving medicines compliance; preventing falls; fighting frailty and malnutrition; developing new care models; and boosting the uptake of ICT solutions for independent living.
The priorities were adopted as part of a Strategic Implementation Plan by the steering group of the pilot partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing in Brussels on 7 November.
The strategy includes in particular actions at the regional level, for example to spread remote monitoring care models for older patients suffering from chronic diseases. Other actions will be added later to these first five priorities, including improving health literacy and the diagnosis of cognitive decline.
The steering group was set up in May and has 33 members including member states and regional authorities, as well as organisations representing groups of patients, doctors, academics, and businesses. Next year, the European Commission will call on other groups to take part in the execution of the plan.
European Innovation Partnerships were proposed by research commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn in February as part of her Innovation Union plans. This first pilot aims to increase the average healthy lifespan in Europe by two years by 2020.