Research and innovation should tackle the challenges of financing health care services in the EU by addressing one or more of the following:

• Financing of health care – development of new cost-effective models for financing and reimbursement, including incentive mechanisms and outcome-based financing in order to promote good performance of the health care systems.
• Financing of preventive health care – novel models and appropriate structure of financial incentives for effective health promotion and disease prevention, financial incentives for stronger co-operation between primary care and public health services, long-term sustainable financing mechanism for local- and municipality-run promotion programmes and the assessment of personal health risk behaviour and its potential impact on health costs.
• Innovative purchasing and contract methods – new strategies for contracting provision of health care services (public sector hired services) as well as solutions to better assess provision capacity and quality, to assess markets, and cost-effectiveness as well as equal access of contracting-out services. This can help align the incentives of providers with those of patients and the public good.
• New and improved tools for better design of incentives for health care professionals – incentives that minimise differentiation between services and “cream-skimming” by patients, fostering better health care planning, optimized use of health care services and avoidance of resources’ overconsumption and -waste.

Research and innovation in these areas should take into account the potential impact of public health emergencies and threats on the sustainability, financing, as well as the effective and efficient functioning of EU health care systems. To ensure wide uptake by user communities and scalability of the models and methods across health systems, actions should promote the highest standards of transparency and openness, going well beyond documentation and extending to aspects such as assumptions, architecture, code and any underlying data.
Applicants are highly encouraged to actively involve public authorities (i.e. ministries of finances and health, procurement agencies/procurers and agencies responsible for the management of health services contracts, public health and health-policy institutes, health administrations, among other) in the proposals.