On Friday 11th December 2020, Astrid van der Velde, from the Isala Heart Centre in Zwolle in the Netherlands, took part in a European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP on AHA) virtual workshop. Co-organised by EHTEL, it focused on using the MAFEIP tool.
MAFEIP is a useful tool that helps people working in a variety of health and care initiatives and projects on digital innovation to:
- Assess the effectiveness of their efforts, and focus especially on how cost-effective they are.
- Understand how impactful their efforts will be over time.
- Understand whether to invest in specific technologies.
The session investigated the implications of experimental designs in European initiatives. It clarified what digital innovators need to know when starting to plan an investigatory study, what useful data can be found through scientific studies, and what data they need to collect.
As the co-ordinator of NWE-Chance, Ms van der Velde used the specific example of the Isala Heart Centre during the workshop to reflect on:
- What would be the relevant dependent and independent variables in a study about NWE-Chance?
- What would be the relevant key performance indicators?
- How would costs be calculated? What types of costs would need to be examined?
Both project partners, Isala Heart Centre and EHTEL were pleased that some 25 people attended the virtual workshop.
In conclusion, Ms van der Velde remarked:
“As a digital innovator, this workshop helped the people in NWE-Chance to understand both what MAFEIP can do in theory but also how it can be applied in practice.”
In 2021, together with EHTEL, NWE-Chance is keen to explore exactly how the MAFEIP tool can be applied to assessing the digital innovations embedded in the project.
To find out more about the MAFEIP tool and what types of evidence NWE-Chance will need to gather to assess its cost-effectiveness: