The first Hub Talks 2022 took place on the 3^rd of February. This webinar has been a great opportunity to learn more about the European mHealth Hub work together with country representatives and stakeholders collecting and sharing national experiences on mHealth.

Violeta I. Pérez Nueno, from World Health Organization, who welcomed the participants to the webinar, highlighted the importance of meetings like this one. The multistakeholder approach is key when implementing and scaling up mHealth programs. The set-up of large scale mHealth programs is hindered by organizational, technical, economic and cultural barriers that require tailored adaptations to be set up progressively, and integrated in current care services. This Hub Talk helps, with the European mHealth Hub work, to facilitate innovation in mHealth and accelerate the EU Digital Single Market.

The session continued with Sonja Müller from empirica Communication and Technology Research. She presented on overview of how the European mHealthHub supported stakeholders from Hungary and the Czech Republic on their mHealth implementation journey. Different starting points in the two countries required different and agile support from the mHealthHub team and impacted the capacity of the two countries to take advantage of all Knowledge Tools of the mHealthHub. One of the main outcomes of the 2-year work will be a co-designed guidance document for the implementation of mHealth applications addressing Type2 Diabetes patients and their carers and supporters. The document considers aspects such as operations management, content development and adaptation, ICT infrastructure and technology, systems integration as well as monitoring and evaluation. It will become available online on the mHealthHub website by the end of February 2022.

Maddalena Illario, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, explained that the mHealth Hub has produced a set of Knowledge Tools (KT), among which KT2 aims to support the iterative development of large scale or national programmes dedicated to type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), supported by mHealth solutions, using a person-centred approach.

Country objectives and setting specifications were captured by an interview  focused on the services and the professionals involved for T2DM patients and were used to feed a SWOT analysis and progress in the development of a Plan for specific targets and settings.

The SWOT questionnaire allowed to outline the different frameworks of implementation for mHealth solutions targeting T2DM, in collaboration with experts coming from some of the European countries/regions involved in the mHealth Hub community, who volunteered to test the transferability of the proposed approach: Autonomous Province of Trento, Marche Region (Italy), Norway, Scotland (United Kingdom), and Turkey.

The SWOT results provided an overview of the key elements hindering the adoption at scale of mHealth solutions for T2DM, among which inadequate allocation of resources, obsolescence of infrastructures, and lack of investments in interoperability. Healthcare professionals and patients/citizens emerge as key players in all cases to build capacity through training and learning activities. Service fragmentation and data issues (fragmented and dirty data) are important weaknesses for all.

The last speaker of this session was Dr. Arturs Mietulis, from Be He@lthy Be Mobile initiative. He presented on lessons learnt from country support.

Report on lessons learnt is about experiences of mHealth implementation in countries that mHealth Hub supported in 2020-2022. It explores Hungary and Czech Republic engagement process and outcomes to guide other countries to succeed in a similar exercise.

The Monitoring and Evaluation matrix was presented. This matrix is based on the lessons learnt and can be used for self-evaluation in order to identify the level of preparedness of the country/region to adopt and implement mHealth interventions.

The webinar ended with a debate between participants and speakers in which doubts were resolved and the conclusions of the meeting were highlighted. It is always very inspiring to have this space because it allows all of us to reflect on the work we have done.

You may watch (or re-watch) this Hub Talk here.