EU European Union (European Union )-HIP supports the participating countries to enhance and improve national IT systems in an efficient and coordinated manner, with the objective of obtaining the necessary interoperability with the IT platform of the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority: HERA. 

For intelligence gathering and threat assessment, HERA needs support from the Member States and associated countries, and a comprehensive state-of-the-art IT system generating actionable insights for decision-making is crucial. The upcoming HERA IT platform for intelligence gathering will only be operational if Member States have strong national IT systems that are interoperable with HERA’s IT system and other relevant systems. EU-HIP supports participating countries to enhance and improve national IT systems in an efficient and coordinated manner, with the objective of obtaining the needed interoperability with HERA’s IT platform. This will entail developing new IT systems and strengthening as well as aligning existing IT systems for the assessment of health threats and for intelligence gathering in the area of medical countermeasures at the national level. Moreover, there is a focus on promoting data comparability and streamlining reporting to different systems. EU-HIP will facilitate integration of national IT systems with the HERA IT platform currently under development, and complement existing systems for early warning and response, epidemic intelligence, public health surveillance and medical countermeasures.

Goals

The overall concept is that EU-HIP brings a high number of countries together to work towards a common aim: to strengthen IT systems to ensure interoperability with HERA’s IT platform. Key aspects are the inherent links to national structures and close collaboration with HERA. The project will substantially strengthen national IT systems and launch an important co-creation and collaboration with HERA for intelligence gathering concerning medical countermeasures.

Consortium

The EU-HIP consortium is large and has extensive geographical coverage across Europe, with public health institutes and ministries of health from 11 EU countries participating. Each partner brings relevant complementary expertise and experiences to the consortium. The consortium has the optimal know-how, qualifications and resources to successfully implement the project, and has demonstrated excellent collaboration during the preparation of the proposal. The Statens Serum Institute coordinates the project.

RIVM role

RIVM contributes to the project by sharing our knowledge and expertise and learning from experiences in other countries. Dr Doctor (Doctor ) Susan van den Hof coordinates RIVM’s contribution to the project at RIVM, as more RIVM staff members from the Centre for Infectious Disease Control are involved. 

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HADEA) under grant agreement No 101102774.