Gathering evidence that matters: The PALANTE project approach to patient empowerment measurement

This paper sheds light on the opportunities identified by the PALANTE consortium in its challenge and aim to design an impact assessment methodology able to generate sound evidence on the role that eHealth solutions might play in empowering patients by pooling data from 9 pilots heterogeneous in several aspects. These opportunities might be of significant value for other EC projects that aim at empowering patients through eHealth solutions and for different stakeholders (e.g.: EC officers, scientific and project coordinators, developers/suppliers of eHealth solutions and so on) that can be helped in facing their tasks. The main result is the deployment of an eHealth solution in an organized, coherent combination of three functionalities, i.e. information, education and communication that permit to overcome pilot heterogeneity. The emergent lessons is the relevance of developing cumulative and large-size knowledge, involving also experts of Health Technology Assessment and Evidence-Based Policy-making in the EC projects.