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The Healthy life years (HLY) modeller was developed during the Innovage project as a system that generated estimates of the impact of a social innovation on healthy life years at specific ages for a population. Users had to input data about the effect sizes of the social innovation for specific age and gender groups to generate the HLY impact figures.
The development of the HLY Modeller represented a big step forward in supporting the spread of successful social innovations more widely across Europe. It was also a substantial contribution to the Europe 2020 plan which tasked the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIPAHA) with a target to increase HLY of the European population by two years between 2010 and 2020.
HLY is a disability-free life expectancy, measuring the average number of remaining years free of activity restriction. While many interventions have been shown to improve quality of life at older ages most are specific to one country and few have spread beyond their initial area of operation. Outcome measures also vary widely, making it impossible to effectively assess impact.
To generate the increase in HLY, the EIPAHA has targeted:
“Improving the quality of life of an ageing population, eg by new innovative solutions, clinical tests, diagnostics and treatments for age-related diseases, deployment of new innovative ICT-based solutions and the development and introduction of novel products, appliances and services specifically suitable for the elderly.”
Social innovation has a significant role to play in meeting the EIPAHA ambitions, especially as social innovations are currently under-exploited both in terms of the ability to assess their relative impact and also to spread more widely the most effective social innovations.
The impact of social innovations can only be maximised from a strong evidence base of successful innovations which have the highest impact on HLY. The Innovage project set out to tackle this by developing the prototype HLY Modeller.
Full explanation and report on the development of the HLY modeller (PDF, 319KB)
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