This proposal from the WHO-ITU is a request for financial support and links to existing European research networks on mHealth from the EC. This will enable both the: 1. Development of national mHealth interventions in selected EU member states to champion the uptake of mHealth 2. Foundation and maintenance of a centralised ‘Knowledge and Innovations Hub for mHealth’ to monitor and enable mHealth adoption and innovation. With the support of the WHO-ITU, the selected national implementations will create precedence for mHealth at scale in Europe, pave the way for other member states to follow suit and serve as a transfer of knowledge and experience from the global WHO-ITU Be Healthy Be Mobile initiative to the mHealth Hub in Europe. In future, the mHealth Hub will serve as a standalone resource for EU member states to support them in deploying and regulating mHealth in their national health services. The Hub will work as a unifying convening platform for existing national country programs on mHealth. It will bring together researchers, projects, knowledge and lessons learnt from individual mHealth projects and clinical trials. From these it will create a “big picture” which will both allow the identification of best practices and standardized guidelines, and also enable researchers to identify gaps in current research which can then help shape new studies. The support requested from the EC in the following proposal will help the initiative and WHO to assist countries to fulfil their commitment of achieving Universal Health Coverage, avoiding vertical intervention models and moving towards integrated health care systems. This will be critical in the coming years for the reduction of national health expenditures without a loss in quality or quantity of national health services.

The European Union (EU) faces a growing health security threat posed by pandemics due to the convergence of risk factors driving disease emergence, amplification and dissemination of pathogens with pandemic potential. Protecting the health and security of citizens in the EU in the face of these pandemic threats requires a coherent response by all stakeholders driven by effective pandemic risk management. PANDEM will contribute to the reduction in the health, socio-economic and security consequences of future pandemics so that society will be better prepared at regional, national, EU and global level. PANDEM will assess current pandemic preparedness and response tools, systems and practice at national, EU and global level in priority areas including risk assessment and surveillance, communication and public information, governance and legal frameworks. PANDEM will then identify gaps and improvement needs leading to the development of viable innovative concepts and analysis of the feasibility of a future demonstration project to strengthen capacity-building for pandemic risk management in the EU. PANDEM specifically addresses the needs and priorities detailed in the Horizon 2020 Work Programme crisis management topic DRS-4. PANDEM will focus on the needs and requirements of users and first responders across the spectrum of pandemic risk management. PANDEM will bring together highly skilled and multi-disciplinary senior experts from the health, security, defence, microbiology, communications, information technology and emergency management fields. Given the cross-border and multi-sectoral context of the health and security challenge for building pandemic risk management capacity, a systems-based methodology will be applied and the final outcome will be developed for use in a pan-European setting.