The VPHi board of directors recently met in London for the first time under the directorship of Prof Lies Geris. Plenty of news emerged from the meeting.
On 24 March 2017, the VPHi board had its first face-to-face meeting of the year. This was the first official meeting driven by the new Executive Director, Prof Lies Geris.
For the occasion, Lies presented the new business strategy for 2017. The strategy received full support from the board, and a number of priorities have been identified and agreed upon. Among the others:
- Clinical Community Outreach: time is now mature for the Institute to develop a targeted strategy to involve clinicians more closely to its activities. Over the past ten years, the VPH research community has grown and consolidated, it has obtained strong political support that allowed in silico medicine research to evolve, and it was able to establish tight links with industry through the Avicenna Alliance. But the challenges aren't over yet. What it is really needed now is to bring the VPH technologies into the clinics, showing their added value to clinicians. Only in this way we will be able to revolutionise the health care sector.
- Communication services for VPH projects: the Institute has been occasionally contributing to VPH funded projects in the past, such as Discipulus and the Avicenna Project. From now onwards, the board has agreed that the Institute shall be playing a much more active role, aiming to become the communication vehicle for all the future VPH related projects, taking care of the dissemination (to the scientific community) and the activities of community building and engagement with external communities. This availability will be soon largely advertised to the membership.
- Networking and consortium building: For the new workprogram (H2020 WP18-20), the VPHi will implement a series of networking opportunities to offer help to VPHi members in the difficult process of consortium building. The website will be expanded with an intranet section accessible to the members where they can find information on ongoing and completed VPH-related projects, as well as search the membership database for relevant expertise. In addition, as soon as new relevant calls will be released, the VPHi will organise dedicated matchmaking events for its members.
Besides these new priorities, the VPHi will continue its activities of liaising with its stakeholders (European Commission, European Parliament, regulators) together with the Avicenna Alliance, and with relevant communities (e.g. through its involvement in the eHealth Stakeholder Group).
Some immediate actions will follow up these important decisions. We will keep you posted on future developments.
