The Gravitate-Health and UNICOM projects forge a partnership to take innovative active steps towards safe, univocal, and explicit patient information on drugs taken and increase patient safety.
Patient safety is ever more vital. Two key projects are now working together to ensure this focus.
Gravitate-Health aims to equip and empower citizens with digital information tools that encourage the safe use of medications for improved health outcomes and quality of life. UNICOM strives to ensure that any medication and its components are accurately identifiable in any part of the world. This will happen through a wide implementation of the IDMP standard across the global drugs eco-system. While UNICOM focuses on cross-border care, Gravitate Health targets priority product information leaflets. Both projects will interact with patients via citizen-focused interfaces and applications.
The two-project partnership will enable a continuous and early use of both projects’ findings, resources, and expertise. The collaboration provides an opportunity to build on two already large networks. The 40 partners in Gravitate Health come from industry, civil society, and academia in 15 countries. The project complements the 41 UNICOM partners active in the domains of regulation, eHealth, standardisation, and industry (especially SMEs).
Of particular interest in the two projects are the current developments in the relationship with the FIHR standard related to medicinal products. The VULCAN HL7 FHIR Connectathons are held three times per year (the last one was held in January 2022). They offer a concrete opportunity to address Medicinal Products Information data flows, FHIR resources, and a server set-up. The two project consortia plan to organise seminars and workshops on e.g., the GDPR and ethical issues. Together, they will engage the partners of both projects in activities of common interest such as attending the UNICOM monthly Community of Expertise webinars.
This two-project agreement translates into a set of practical objectives. It has four concrete aims. They include a wide range of stakeholders willing to reach higher levels of adherence to treatment; safer use of medications (pharmacovigilance); and better health outcomes and quality of life.
The two projects will also work together to develop new and deeper insights into how the use of available health information can be optimised. The result will be effective risk minimisation measures.
Gravitate Health and UNICOM are EU funded projects which have received funding from the Horizon 2020 programme.
