CHALLENGES TACKLED BY THE FOCUS IN CD PROJECT
Public sector is a hidden source of variety of innovation potential. Social innovation, new and emerging technologies, digital platforms, processes and tools, greater citizen engagement, can enable that public services become more innovative, more tuned in with the societal challenges of 21st century and adjusted to shrinking national budgets. Among the greatest social challenges facing Europe is longer life expectancy with aging population. This fact has also contributed to increased burden of chronic diseases among European population in the past decade. Lack of development and promotion of innovative quality health service, disease management models and education in the field of management of chronic diseases, is affecting sustainability of CE health care systems. Current system allows for late diagnosis, high costs, lower quality of life of citizens, it is mainly specialist-driven and hospital-focused. What we need is important mind-shift to take place, which will eventually enable the development of patient centered management care services. To tackle this challenge, project will demonstrate development and pilot testing of innovative health service model in case of celiac disease. Celiac disease can serve as a model in sense of low awareness and insufficient knowledge and capacities, which lead to late diagnosis and under-treatment. It takes the average health system up to 10 years to identify a patient, with many unneeded and expensive procedures. It triggers other chronic diseases with huge negative implications that could have easily been prevented. At the same time many patients are unfairly discriminated in several regions because a high cost of the only possible treatment (lifelong gluten free diet) is left with patients themselves. Tested model in the case of celiac disease would present an innovative management model tool in the field of health services, available to tackle issues of other existing chronic diseases in our health systems.
