One of the goals of the VPH Institute is to secure support from the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Member States, to ensure that the level of funding the VPH-related research has enjoyed since 2006 will be sustained in the next framework program. To meet this goal, the VPH Institute recently contracted a professional firm specialized in policy affairs.
In a context where e-health is often understood as a mere synonym to data exchange, internet applications for self diagnosis and tele-monitoring, Biomedical Engineers are developing the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) - an ICT-based application that will eventually bridge the gap between e-health and daily clinical practice.
Biomedical Engineering searches for solutions to address unmet needs in healthcare by pooling the expertise of medical researchers, engineers and ICT experts, but this has hardly been an area of major focus in EU policy. Since 2006, EU policy makers started realising its potential in terms of innovation and growth and secured some funding to this initiative, but action is still necessary to secure long term commitment towards researchers and the projects currently supported by the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7).
Considering the importance of this purpose, the VPH Institute has recently contract a professional policy affairs firm, Rohde Public Policy which will help us to develop an ad-hoc program for the next three years, targeting the FP8, and the general positioning of the VPH at the European level and with the member states.
Rohde will be mainly involved in three important tasks:
The next step will be the establishment of a work group on “Policy affair for integrative research and VPH Technology” which will be working in close collaboration with Rohde to make sure all these goals will be successfully met.
We will keep you posted on the future developments!
