Improving Digital Empowerment for Active Healthy Living

The Improving Digital Empowerment for Active Healthy Living project (IDEAHL) aims at developing and testing new models and approaches of (digital) health literacy ((d)HL) intervention development and application through the co-creation of a comprehensive and inclusive EU (d)HL Strategy. The IDEAHL consortium is composed of 14 multi-disciplinary partners from 10 EU Member States, which work hand in hand with patients, citizens, and the broad socio-economic sector at local level.

The project will first conduct an extensive mapping of health literacy (HL) and (d)HL research, initiatives, and projects in the EU and beyond. It will define best practices and champions in these fields to foster knowledge exchange and uptake of selected practices. Building on these foundations, IDEAHL will launch a large co-creation process to design and plan its EU (d)HL Strategy. The project will involve over 1,300 different stakeholders, from citizens and patients to healthcare and social services, policy makers, non-health sectors, academia, etc.

The collected feedbacks will allow to develop an inclusive Strategy to improve (d)HL for the benefit of all citizens focusing on health promotion, disease prevention, treatment and (self-)care as well as on monitoring its impact on the wellbeing, productivity and the economy. The Strategy will pay special attention to social innovation, inclusion, gender, and ethics & privacy dimensions. Finally, a number of actions of the Strategy will be piloted in the 10 project countries. From the testing and evaluation of the pilots, IDEAHL will be able to put forward a common EU monitoring model and indicators for (d)HL levels.

The ultimate purpose of the project will be to empower EU citizens in using digital tools to take a more active role in the management of their own health and well-being, as well as supporting social innovations for person-centred care models.