HERCULES

Person-centred care and support/personalized medicine (PCCS) is a rapidly developing field, crucial in tackling rocketing demand for healthcare (HC) services from an exponentially rising “silver” population. Today’s reactive HC systems must urgently transition to more proactive and preventive ones, with patients continuously monitored and empowered, and – at the same time – considerably reduced costs of care.
Rapid uptake of advanced technologies in care delivery are key to realising this new proactive mode. This depends on effective encouragement of innovation from the demand-side. In this sense, public procurement (PP) in health – which represents half of EU public sector spend (worth c.14% of EU GDP) – is the best tool at Regional Administrations' disposal to foster HC innovation, but most encounter significant barriers to deploying it. Learning how to address these difficulties is fragmented across PCCS technologies, projects and administrations. This limits advances in effectiveness and efficiency, and under-performance further holds back the EU's innovative HC solutions development and the uptake by public administrations (PA) as a major driving force in the adoption of such instruments.
To break this cycle, HERCULES will enable the 7 partner regions (representing all PA cultures in Europe, and diverse policy instruments (PI) and levels of PP PCCS capability), supported by the advisory partner, to substantially increase their capacity in PP PCCS performance (patients at the centre of the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, and management of the health cycle), at the forefront of future research and innovation in health, and to improve their PIs. Collectively, the partners will pool good practices and generate actionable, transferable knowledge on advancing uptake of innovative PCCS solutions. This will help decisively to universalize the learning across EU regions and maintain Europe among the most innovative health regions in the world.