Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) present a significant public health challenge throughout Europe, being the leading cause of morbidity and a major contributor to mortality. Despite technological advancements and preventative strategies, the burden of CVD remains substantial, and the cardiac care pathways across Europe are inadequately mapped. The overarching goal of the EuroHeartPath consortium is to transform cardiovascular care pathways across the continuum of care. By adopting a pan-European scope and facilitating cross-country comparisons, EuroHeartPath aims to elucidate how care is organized and delivered, providing deeper insights and identifying best practices for integration with the support of stakeholders, including ESC, WONCA, EUPHA, and EPA. EuroHeartPath will simultaneously conduct 18 pathfinder studies to optimize the personalized early detection, diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of heart failure, atrial fibrillation, ventricular fibrillation, and coronary disease, with a particular emphasis on prevention. These studies are categorized into four key areas: 1) novel artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning applications, such as automated AI analysis of ECGs and Holters, and AI for predicting cardiomyopathies and cardiovascular events; 2) digital health integration, aimed at improving the diagnosis of aortic stenosis and enhancing secondary prevention measures; 3) point-of-care testing, including the use of point-of-care diagnostics in primary practice and ambulances to exclude heart failure; and 4) technology and robotics, encompassing robotic echocardiography and invasive diagnostics in obstructive epicardial coronary artery disease. EuroHeartPath will create a paradigm shift in the management and treatment of heart disease, offering substantial scientific, societal, and economic impacts across the entire patient health journey with a patient centric approach.

Hypertension, or high blood pressure (BP), is a serious medical condition, and the single biggest contributor to circulatory diseases which continue to dominate as the leading cause of death and morbidity across the EU. It accounts for almost 10 percent of all healthcare-related costs. Systolic hypertension leads to a broad variety of diseases with an immense impact on both patients and healthcare systems. HYPERMARKER will unleash the potential of pharmacometabolomics to provide a ‘smart’ prescription of antihypertensive therapy. Well-phenotyped cohorts from eleven European countries will provide metabolomic profiles and blood samples for pharmacometabolomic assessments to identify predictors of treatment response in hypertension using advanced AI and deep learning methods. Prediction models for individual treatment responses to antihypertensive medication will be clinically validated and refined through an innovative RCT across 4 sites in Europe. The result is a clinical decision support tool that will give clinicians the ability to make an informed selection of whether the patient they are treating will best respond to the use of angiotensin inhibition, calcium antagonists, beta-blockers, or a range of other existing drugs with evidence-based for BP control. To ensure sustainability, the project will also develop a framework for the uptake of this tool in routine care for patients with hypertension across Europe and beyond. HYPERMARKER will be implemented by a group of world-class scientists and clinicians from a diversity of disciplines who have collaborated multiple times and have a track record of leading key national and EU-funded initiatives to deliver high-impact results.