On Monday 12 and Tuesday 13 June, the ONCODIR project partners came together for the official project kick-off in Thessaloniki, Greece. Coordinated by the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), 27 partners are joining hands under the acronym ONCODIR: “Evidence-based Participatory Decision Making for Cancer Prevention through Implementation Research” through implementation this research project integrates multidisciplinary research methods from health policy analytics, social and behavioral science, artificial intelligence (AI) – powered multi-omics and retrospective data analytics, as well as decision support theories to deliver evidence-based cancer prevention programs and innovative AI-powered personalized prevention approaches. The coherent technological ecosystem that ONCODIR is developing is based on robust AI trustworthiness and privacy preserving principles to deploy recommendation services that will be specified by citizens, health policy actors and Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) experts, during three design thinking workshops. SSH research will address aspects such as the life-status, nutritional and social habits in tandem with Economics, Sociology and Local/Regional Cultural Identity and Ethics. ONCODIR’s results will be validated in three Laboratory Integration Tests (LITs) and three Large-scale Intervention Pilots (LIPs) in five EU member states, with the active involvement of medical scientists, health care providers, foundations, and consortium experts.
“The ONCODIR project is an opportunity to create something impactful that will ameliorate the lives of citizens with regard to early prevention of colorectal cancer (CRC). To achieve our objectives, we are committed to providing methodological tools and technologies that cater not only to the needs of citizens, but clinicians and policy makers as well. We are employing a co-design and co-creative approach that values the feedback of all aforementioned groups in order to ascertain that the evidence-based, behavioral-changing suggested solutions will be adopted by the implicated stakeholders and, thus, implemented into actual policies.
EUREGHA holds a key role to this project, actively participating into the co-design and continuous system adaptation based on end-user needs. It is engaged into the policy mapping of the implementation research framework, also providing support for the living guidelines and the implementation protocol for ONCODIR’s CRC interventions adoption in clinical practice. Last, EUREGHA will disseminate and communicate the projects’ results amongst its extensive network of members.”
