Engineering, leader in digital transformation for businesses and public administration, is among four Italian companies awarded IPCEI (Important Projects of Common European Interest) funding under the Tech4Cure initiative, the second European IPCEI program aimed at fostering innovation in medical devices. The Group will carry out a total investment of €64.02 million, of which 70% will be publicly funded and the remaining 30% fully covered by Engineering itself, further strengthening its role as a strategic player in building advanced digital infrastructure for the healthcare of the future.

Engineering will develop OPOH – One Person One Health, a five-year project (three years of R&D and two years of first industrial-scale implementation) designed to radically transform the integration of Clinical Decision Support (CDS) systems—accelerating the adoption of predictive, preventive, and personalized (3P) medicine into everyday clinical practice.

CDSs are digital tools and medical devices designed to assist healthcare professionals in decision-making based on up-to-date, evidence-based knowledge and supported by AI. They analyze, filter, and organize large volumes of medical information, research, and clinical guidelines, making them readily accessible to healthcare professionals, thereby bridging the gap between the lab and the bedside.

Despite their potential, CDS adoption today remains limited due to several challenges: they are often designed for single diseases, require lengthy and costly certifications, and are difficult to integrate into existing healthcare systems. This results in a major disconnect between innovations developed in laboratories and their real-world application, forcing clinicians to use fragmented tools that are hard to embed into daily workflows. This gap is especially problematic in today’s complex clinical environment, where healthcare professionals must manage hundreds of mal conditions with constantly evolving gold standards and knowledge.

With OPOH, Engineering, leveraging over 25 years of digital health expertise, aims to develop an open, modular, and interoperable ecosystem based on certified CDS (Executable Medical Knowledge), compliant with the EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR) and the AI Act. These devices will be dynamically connectable with each other and with existing clinical applications, without the need for further certification or system changes. Certified CDS modules will also be developed for three priority clinical areas: oncology, neurodegenerative diseases, and chronic conditions.

Imagine a general practitioner managing a patient with multiple chronic diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension. Today, for each medical condition, they must consult different guidelines (constantly updated) and use separate digital tools (when available), often incompatible with their clinical system. With OPOH, the same doctor would receive integrated, personalized recommendations directly within the electronic health record, based on the most current scientific evidence, enabling faster, more effective decision-making and improving the patient care pathway.

"OPOH represents a paradigm shift in the way we envision the medicine of the future. With this project, we aim to structurally and effectively bridge the gap between laboratory research and clinical practice, enabling a faster and more efficient transfer of scientific innovation into real-world car" said Fabio Momola, Executive Vice-President at Engineering. "This is a concrete opportunity for both doctors and patients: clinicians will benefit from integrated and personalized recommendations based on a patient’s full clinical and therapeutic history, while patients will receive more tailored, effective, and up-to-date care. This will be made possible through strong collaborations with national and European stakeholders—including hospitals, public institutions, and professional associations involved in validation and promotion, as well as universities and research centers that will support us in addressing the technological and clinical challenges of this transformative project."

The IPCEI Tech4Cure initiative stands out for the key role played by highly specialized SMEs in the development of CDS. In this context, Engineering aims to build close synergies with these players, ensuring they are the first to adopt and enhance the OPOH ecosystem, making it a truly enabling tool for the entire European healthcare system.

The ecosystem will also include an open-source framework allowing researchers, developers, and companies to easily create new CDS modules, fueling a virtuous cycle of continuous medical knowledge sharing and evolution.

A dedicated online portal will serve as a digital clinical marketplace where healthcare professionals and hospital facilities can access certified, ready-to-use CDS modules, ensuring the immediate transfer of scientific knowledge from research to clinical practice.

The project will also deliver four healthcare applications, all fully compatible with the OPOH ecosystem:

1. Healthcare Personalisation System - a tool for healthcare professionals to define personalized care pathways, integrating CDS recommendations.

2. Citizen’s App - a digital therapeutic app for patients to follow their personalized treatment plans.

3. Multi-omics Tool - a tool for geneticists and researchers to analyze genomic and molecular data, integrated with existing clinical systems.

4. Precision Population Health Tool - a data-driven application for policymakers to design and monitor public health policies using precision health data and CDS.

OPOH is the second IPCEI project involving Engineering. The Group is also a key participant in IPCEI-Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS) an EU digital and industrial policy initiative to create a sovereign cloud-to-edge infrastructure aligned with member state values. Within this framework, Engineering is developing AVANT, a suite of software solutions leveraging Digital Twin (DT) technology across various sectors, including manufacturing, energy, healthcare, cultural heritage, and urban services.