The SAPHIRe consortium warmly invites you to the first in a series of online interactive workshops in spring 2021 on the specific needs of European regions concerning personalised medicine. The topic of the first webinar will be ‘Problems and solutions for personalised healthcare in remote, rural, and sparsely populated regions’ and will be organised on Tuesday 20 April 2021, 10h00-12h30. You can register for this webinar here: https://forms.gle/xSWuHLRksJhQfXj48. 

The uptake of personalised medicine encounters different difficulties according to regional particularities. Especially regions that are remote, rural, or sparsely populated face challenges that are greater than urban or capital regions. Isolated populations may have specific genetic backgrounds that predispose them to particular illnesses. Hospitals may be far away and difficult to reach. Rural populations are often aging populations that may not be sufficiently digitally knowledgeable for receiving care through digital means. If all European citizens are to enjoy the benefits of personalised healthcare, which entails tailoring therapies to patients’ genotypic and phenotypic traits and a shift to preventive medicine, then the infrastructure and institutions of remote, rural, and sparsely populated regions must be equipped to deal with data collecting and sharing, privacy and security issues, patient education, and so on.  

The topics to be discussed will include: 

• Personalisedhealthcare for remote and rural areas 
• digital needs and preparedness of GPsin rural and isolated areas 
• distance-spanning technologies and telemedicine

Confirmed speakers: 

• Anna L. Prytherch, Rural healthcare Wales
• Jean Pierre Jacquet, President European Rural and Isolated Practitioners Association (EURIPA)
• Anna Lundgren, Senior Research Fellow at Nordregio

The definitive agenda and list of speakers will be provided in time on the SAPHIRe website.  

SAPHIRe, which stands for Securing the Adoption of Personalised Health in Regions, is a 3.5-year project (2019-2022) funded by the European Commission (DG Research & Innovation) under the Horizon 2020 programme, and is managed by a consortium consisting of the department of Economy, Science and Innovation of the Flemish Government, the Public Health Agency of Northern Ireland, EIT Health/InnoStars and EuroBioForum Foundation (see www.saphire-eu.eu). The aim of the project is to map personalised medicine and health policies in European regions, with special regard to remote and sparsely populated regions, and to establish and support networking between interested regions in order to exchange good practices, facilitate interregional collaboration and identify opportunities for funding of joint projects. In this regard SAPHIRe supports the agenda of ICPerMed, the international consortium for personalised medicine.