A structured European mechanism for COVID-19 exchange to organize and share information between countries is urgently needed, especially in the area of population health. Information on the broader impacts of COVID-19 on the health of populations is needed to facilitate multidisciplinary European research and underpin decision making. PHIRI aims to facilitate and support open, interconnected, and data-driven research through the sharing of cross-country COVID-19 population health information and exchange of best practices related to data collection, curation, processing, use and reuse following ELSI and FAIR principles. It has the objective: to provide a Health Information portal for COVID-19 with FAIR catalogues on health and health care data, to provide structured exchange between countries on COVID-19 best practices and expertise, and to promote interoperability and tackle health information inequalities. To this end, it builds with national nodes a Health Information portal (WP4) on data sources, population health studies, training material and courses, considering ethical and legal aspects. The portal is supported by WP7 that provides the technological substrate for the development of a federated research infrastructure. WP5 develops a consolidated framework to assess the direct and indirect impacts of COVID-19 on population wellbeing, morbidity and mortality. WP6 will look at COVID-19 impacts in specific subgroups by conducting research through use cases of immediate relevance and facilitates research by making scalable, reproducible methods available within PHIRI. WP8, the Rapid Exchange Forum, provides swift responses to research and policy questions that are raised in countries to handle the COVID-19 pandemic. WP9 gains insights in possible future health impacts of the coronavirus outbreak by modelling scenarios for national situations. This will be carried out in close collaboration with different types of actors and initiatives across Europe (WP3).

The detection of infectious disease emergence relies on reporting cases, i.e. indicator-based surveillance (IBS). This method lacks sensitivity, due to non or delayed reporting of cases. In a changing environment due to climate change, animal and human mobility, population growth and urbanization, there is an increased risk of emergence of new and exotic pathogens, which may pass undetected with IBS. Hence, the need to detect signals of disease emergence using informal, multiple sources, i.e. event-based surveillance (EBS). The MOOD project aims at harness the data mining and analytical techniques to the big data originating from multiple sources to improve detection, monitoring, and assessment of emerging diseases in Europe. To this end, MOOD will establish a framework and visualisation platform allowing real-time analysis and interpretation of epidemiological and genetic data in combination with environmental and socio-economic covariates in an integrated inter-sectorial, interdisciplinary, One health approach: 1)Data mining methods for collecting and combining heterogeneous Big data, 2)A network of disease experts to define drivers of disease emergence, 3)Data analysis methods applied to the Big data to model disease emergence and spread, 4)Ready-to-use online platform destined to end users, i.e. national and international human and veterinary public health organizations, tailored to their needs, complimented with capacity building and network of disease experts to facilitate risk assessment of detected signals. MOOD output will be designed and developed with end users to assure their routine use during and beyond MOOD. They will be tested and fine-tuned on air-borne, vector-borne, water-borne model diseases, including anti-microbial resistance. Extensive consultations with end users, studies into the barriers to data sharing, dissemination and training activities and studies on the cost-effectiveness of MOOD output will support future sustainable user uptake

HEART’s integrated approach aims to significantly improve urban health and reduce health disparities through an innovative urban planning methodology that embraces and promotes the policy making of proper Blue-Green (BG)-based technologies with techniques for changing individual -citizens’- behaviour. HEART mainly targets to: (i) monitor and efficiently assess the impact of specific BG-based interventions on Public Health (PH) and Well-Being (WB) through studies to be carried out at both clinical and non-clinical settings, in three European cities, i.e. Belgrade (Serbia), Aarhus (Denmark) and Athens (Greece). This way HEART aims to create evidence-based policy making recommendations that will be addressed to the relevant health authorities of these countries (based on specific KPIs), (ii) change individual -citizens’- health related behaviour, by using emerging ICT-based techniques, (iii) develop robust plans for regenerating and rehabilitating urban ecosystems to improve PH and WB, while in parallel addressing key challenges such as low environmental quality and low biodiversity, resilience to Climate Change and extreme weather conditions, air pollution, undervalued use of space in deprived and residual-values areas leading to health inequalities; (iv) create inclusive and accessible urban environments by systematically implementing gender mainstreaming strategies and new participatory tools (ICT-based) in order to ensure that diverse groups’ needs are properly considered and embedded into urban-regeneration-planning; (v) design urban regenerating plans targeting to deliver cities-for-people: the proposed BG solutions will improve citizens’ quality of life, based on real evidence and co-design processes, as well as stimulating and supporting social inclusivity for all; and (vi) improve urban resilience (operational, social and economic) through interventions designed using a set of urban planning matrices based on stakeholders’ participation. ΗEART is part of the European Urban Health cluster.