CFAs: Identifying and Addressing Low-Value Care in Health and Care Systems

This initiative focuses on enabling healthcare providers and policymakers to use evidence-based indicators and methodologies to identify low-value care practices, equipping healthcare professionals with the knowledge and tools to implement guidelines that reduce or discontinue low-value care while maintaining patient-centred quality care, ensuring patients and citizens benefit from more effective healthcare, improving overall health outcomes, and supporting health systems in reducing low-value care to enhance patient safety, resource efficiency, fiscal and environmental sustainability, and enabling healthcare organisations to reallocate resources to areas of greater need.

The funding for this initiative includes a total budget of €38,000,000, with individual projects expected to receive around €10,000,000, supporting large-scale research and innovation actions aimed at addressing low-value care across diverse healthcare systems. This funding structure is designed to enable comprehensive, multidisciplinary projects that can generate strong evidence, develop practical tools, and implement scalable solutions with long-term impact.

Low-value care has widespread negative consequences for patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals, and health systems, contributing to wasteful spending, misuse of resources, and inefficiencies. Addressing low-value care can free up healthcare resources, improve outcomes, enhance resilience, and reduce environmental impacts. Research activities should adopt a patient-centred approach, promoting socially acceptable solutions, considering ethical, social, and legal aspects, and fostering dialogue among policymakers, healthcare providers, professionals, and citizens. Engaging civil society organisations ensures the acceptability of solutions and supports better use of healthcare resources, improving patient outcomes and alleviating pressure on healthcare professionals and systems.

Proposed activities may include clinical studies to generate evidence on the value of interventions, digital and AI-based tools to identify and address low-value care, evaluation of healthcare payment systems, collaboration among registries to compare levels of care, and sharing of best practices across regions and countries. Research actions should focus on understanding how low-value care can be identified and measured, detecting overuse, misuse, underuse, and unwarranted variation in healthcare delivery, and developing pilot strategies for effective reduction of low-value care with demonstrated scalability and transferability across European health systems.

Health systems face challenges in sustainability, resilience, and inequalities in access to high-quality care. Transforming healthcare systems involves adopting innovative, practical, scalable, and financially sound solutions that improve governance, provide decision-makers with evidence and tools, and ensure long-term fiscal, environmental, and climate sustainability. Patient-centred approaches should empower individuals, foster active dialogue, support healthcare professionals, and enable scalable solutions that can be applied across diverse healthcare systems. Projects under this initiative align with European health strategies, including the European Care Strategy, the digital transformation of health and care, the European Pillar of Social Rights, and the European Green Deal, promoting fair and inclusive access to high-quality healthcare.

The initiative encourages cooperation among EU-funded projects to foster knowledge exchange, joint activities, and synergies across different clusters and pillars of Horizon Europe, including digital health, public health sustainability, and AI-enabled healthcare solutions. By supporting cross-fertilisation and collaboration with other EU programmes, such as the EU4Health Programme, projects can maximize impact and contribute to modernising health systems while addressing health inequalities.

For more information, visit European Commission.