Specific Challenge:

The number of people with chronic illness is growing and almost half of them have multiple chronic conditions. Patients with complex chronic conditions (CCCs) have chronic multi-morbidities or chronic disease complications that require the attention of multiple health care providers or facilities as well as home-based care. A patient with CCC presents to the health care system with unique constellation of needs, disabilities, or functional limitations^[1].

Managing patients with complex chronic conditions therefore needs approaches that ensure multi-disciplinary, personalised and well accepted by the patient ways of care and monitoring.

The controlled randomised clinical trials on chronic diseases provide important information that can be translated in the daily clinical practice, but they often do not comprise sufficient breadth and depth commensurate to the complexity of diseases, and to the degree of personalisation of treatment needed.

Real World Data (referring specifically to any type of data not collected in a randomised clinical trial) can complement these to fill the knowledge gap between controlled clinical trials results and clinical practice needs in real environments. They can provide new insights into disease patterns and help improve the safety and effectiveness of health interventions.

Tapping into this rich resource of ‘real world data’ issued from daily clinical practice, either collected on a permanent/regular basis by public bodies or through devices and mobile applications, , and smartly assembled in combination with clinical studies, should boost both output and relevance of controlled clinical research results.

For more information please visit the EC website: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/sc1-dth-12-2020