The management of chronic health care conditions already consumes more than half of all health care expenditure in developed countries. Well before the end of the century, demographic trends will make current arrangements unaffordable. Fortunately, advances in medical and scientific knowledge, together with increasingly affordable and pervasive information technology (IT), make it possible to anticipate the delivery of good preventive management and the best clinical practice, closer to the patient, which can simultaneously improve the quality of patient care and provide substantial cost benefits. This paper describes the investigations made by the Eurodiabeta Consortium with regard to diabetes, a lifelong condition affecting more than 2% of the population. Partly funded by the European Community's Advanced Informatics in Medicine (AIM) framework programme, the Eurodiabeta Consortium comprised 16 complementary clinical, medical informatics and industrial partners, drawn from seven countries. Progress is reviewed and the opportunities and challenges ahead are explored. Other aspects covered are the Consortium's approach to the sensitive and crucial consideration of medical quality assurance, experience working with the European Commission, and the non-technological factors-social, economic and political - which must be addressed in the runup to bringing Eurodiabeta-type products into the market lace.
