The IDEAHL project, ‘Improving Digital Empowerment for Healthy and Active Living’ is one of the projects managed by Consulta Europa, composed of 14 multidisciplinary partners from 10 EU member states. The ultimate goal of this project is to empower EU citizens to use digital tools to take a more active role in managing their own health and well-being, as well as to support social innovations for person-centred care models.
Moreover, IDEAHL aims to develop and test new models and approaches for the development and implementation of (digital) health literacy ((d)HL) interventions, which will be achieved through the co-creation process of the EU’s comprehensive and inclusive digital health literacy strategy. This co-creation process will involve 1300 different stakeholders, from citizens and patients to health and social services, policy makers, non-health sectors, academia, etc., to ensure that the strategy is indeed inclusive and comprehensive.
The IDEAHL EU Strategy will pay particular attention to the dimensions of social innovation, inclusion, gender and ethics and privacy. A number of actions of the strategy will be piloted in the 10 project countries to test and evaluate their effectiveness. Based on the testing and evaluation of the pilot projects, IDEAHL will be able to propose a common EU monitoring model and indicators for digital health literacy levels.
On 7 March, the IDEAHL consortium held its first High-Level Policy Making Event at the European Parliament, where this innovative approach to digital health literacy was presented to policy makers. During this event, the IDEAHL team outlined the extensive mapping of digital health literacy research, initiatives and projects in the European Union on which the project approach will be based.
As part of this event, and as part of the project activities, Consulta Europa held a co-creation session with partners and policy makers, which aimed to identify the main barriers and areas for improvement in the field of digital health literacy. The session proved to be very fruitful, as thanks to the pro-activity of the participants, a state-of-the-art analysis of (d)HL was achieved, which will allow the development of concrete interventions to be included in the European Digital Health Literacy Strategy, the main objective of IDEAHL.
In the coming months, IDEAHL partners will continue to conduct their co-creation sessions with the different population groups. In this way, the necessary information will be gathered for the creation and further development of the European Digital Health Literacy Strategy.
For more information about the IDEAHL project, please visit this link.