The team is the first in Canada to receive Horizon Europe funding, leading a project to improve post-hospital care for sepsis.
A team led by UBC’s Dr. Matthew Wiens is the first in Canda to receive funding through the Horizon Europe program, after being awarded €5 million for a project that aims to reduce childhood deaths from severe infection (sepsis) after hospital discharge in Uganda and Kenya.
Horizon Europe is the world’s largest research and innovation program. Canadian researchers recently became eligible for the program after an agreement signed by the Government of Canada and the European Union in July 2024.
The project, led by researchers from UBC, the Institute for Global Health at BC Children’s Hospital and BC Women’s Hospital + Health Centre, and BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute, is being funded through the Global Health EDCTP3 Joint Undertaking, which focuses on accelerating clinical development of health innovations.
Called REConeCteD: Risk Enhanced Community Care after Discharge, the project builds on the group’s Smart Discharges program, which leverages digital health technologies to identify children at highest risk after hospital discharge and deliver targeted personalized follow-up care.
Follow-up care is crucial for children in the weeks and months following discharge from hospital after suspected or proven sepsis. Eleven million people die of sepsis every year, with the vast majority of deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries. Studies have shown that more than one in 20 children younger than five years of age who are admitted with suspected sepsis die within six months after being released from hospital.
“In East African countries such as Uganda, there have been concerted efforts to build up referral systems to better connect community care to facility-based care, however the reverse isn’t true,” says project lead Dr. Matthew Wiens, an assistant professor of anesthesiology, pharmacology and therapeutics at UBC’s Faculty of Medicine and investigator at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute. “Once a child is discharged from hospital, there aren’t enough resources or strategies in place to inform home communities of the need for follow-up care.”
Enhancing community-based care
The project will implement digital tools to identify and prioritize the children at highest risk, emphasize the importance of practicing healthy behaviors at home, provide guidance on how to seek care when needed, and ensure people stay connected to the health care system.
One of the ways this has been made easier is through the introduction of the electronic Community Health Information System (eCHIS) — a mobile application by the Ministries of Health in several African countries to digitize community health services.
“With REConneCteD, children can be connected to community health workers to make follow-up care easier.”
Dr. Matthew Wiens
By digitally linking e-CHIS with a child’s electronic health record, the project will help ensure that the most at-risk children are reconnected with community health workers for follow-up after discharge. It can also provide information and education through the platform to community health workers about disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment of childhood diseases.
“It can take months for a child hospitalized for sepsis to fully recover and this period is fraught with the risk of re-infection, further health complications, or even death” says Dr. Wiens. “With REConneCteD, children can be connected to community health workers to make follow-up care easier.”
The Smart Discharges platform was originally conceived in 2011 to address the gap in care following hospital discharge and to find better ways to use limited resources intelligently and precisely to help as many people as possible.
Many lives could be saved if hospitals had better tools to ensure these could thrive after going home. A study that enrolled more than 13,000 children in Uganda, currently published as a preprint, found that the Smart Discharges platform significantly reduced post-discharge mortality.
“The secondary benefit of this digital platform is its use for education,” says Dr. Wiens. “By creating locally adapted guidelines as well as training materials and educational resources for caregivers, such as videos on how to recognize danger signs, we can go a long way towards ensuring better health for these children.”
Working with collaborators including the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme (Kenya), Walimu (Uganda) and Brock University, the team will now evaluate the impact on post-discharge mortality in a robust clinical trial.
“Following the trial, we anticipate that REConneCted will be in a position where national scaling within digitized regions is a real possibility. Even in areas with limited digitization, we are building processes and systems that can support improvements in the facility-to-community transition of care for children,” says Dr. Wiens.
Following the agreement between the Government of Canada and the European Union, Canadians can now access a broader range of research opportunities through the Horizon Europe program. UBC researchers interested in being part of a consortium applying for Horizon Europe Pillar 2 funding can learn more on UBC’s SPARC website.
This work is funded by the European Union under Global Health EDCTP3. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of Global Health EDCTP3 nor its members. Neither of the parties can be held responsible for them.
A version of this story was originally published on the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute website.