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.

Social Prescribing (SP) is an innovative solution to bridging the gap between primary health care and non-clinical supports and services within the community. SP enables general practitioners who identify health-related social problems to refer patients to a so-called link worker. The link worker provides personalized support and helps these patients to access community resources by addressing any barriers that may exist. SP is an approach to integrate health and social care and strengthen community orientation. SP thereby mitigates the effects of social determinants of health on health outcomes. However, SP has not been tailored to the needs of people in vulnerable situations yet and the effectiveness of SP to improve their access to health and care services remains unknown. The overall objective of SP-EU is to assess the potential of SP to promote and improve access to health and care services for people in vulnerable situations, focusing on three primary target groups: LGBTIQ persons, refugees and first-generation immigrants and older adults living alone. SP-EU follows a mixed-methods approach: SP adaptations will be co-created with the target groups, to adapt them to their specific needs and social contexts. A pragmatic randomized controlled trial will assess the effectiveness of the adapted SP to improve access by randomizing 1,776 patients in eight EU countries to receive SP or care as usual. A qualitative analysis in five European countries will explore enabling and limiting factors to the implementation of SP from different stakeholders’ perspectives. Additionally, we will communicate and disseminate results and translate them into policy action. SP-EU will enable health care systems to implement SP as a scalable, safe, cost-effective and people-centred solution to provide equal access to sustainable care. Thus, SP-EU will enable the transformation of European health care systems to equitable, community-based, people-centred and integrated health care.

EARLY project aims to reduce the burden of non-communicable diseases such as mental health conditions (MHC), especially depression, anxiety, stress disorders, substance use disorders and identify and reduce risky modifiable exposures for these conditions in youth. EARLY will pursue this goal through developing a comprehensive exposure matrix which can be adapted to emerging new risks, to understand youth, parents`, and stakeholders perceptions, we will conduct qualitative, interviews, by providing representative, multinational data on youth MHC and through developing, implementing and evaluating a multicomponent intervention. This will serve as an innovative model for promoting mental health and preventing MHC. EARLY is a mixed methods study which combines qualitative and quantitative methods. To provide a overview on youth mental health measures we will review measures, to provide data on exposure factors and whether exposure estimates vary by country, age, and gender, we will review studies and identify and merge available data on youth mental health; to provide insights on perceptions we will conduct focus groups with end-users. To provide representative data on youth MHC we will conduct a cross-sectional survey which are the baseline data for the multicomponent pilot intervention in five selected countries. To provide data on effectiveness and sustainability of interventions to reduce MHC we will conduct a multicomponent intervention. The results will be a a) model of youth mental health, b) a matrix of exposures, c) insights and understandings on end-users perceptions of youth mental health, d) knowledge on services for use in the European region and identification of needs; e) representative data on youth mental health which can be easily accessed by researchers and policymakers; f) data on effectiveness and sustainability of interventions to reduce both exposures and MHC in youth and finally g) non-communicable diseases risk reduction in adolescence and youth.