A digital platform that streamlines and personalises care delivery for asthma patients.
The challenge
Asthma affects over 262 million people globally, with a high prevalence across Europe – impacting 8% of adults and 9% of children. [1],[2] Despite being a manageable condition, asthma remains a significant health and economic burden, particularly in severe cases that lead to frequent emergency visits and hospital admissions.
In Europe, around 10% of adult asthma patients suffer from severe or difficult-to-control forms of the disease. [3] These individuals often experience recurrent exacerbations, reduced quality of life, and increased risk of unplanned hospitalisation. Caregivers are also heavily impacted, often navigating fragmented healthcare systems and filling in coordination gaps themselves. [4],[5]
Evidence shows that timely identification and adherence to clinical guidelines can significantly reduce emergency care needs. [6] Yet care for asthma remains highly fragmented, with poor integration across home, primary, and specialist care settings. This fragmentation leads to delayed responses to respiratory crises, especially in slow-onset episodes that evolve over days and are often mismanaged.
Compounding the issue, Europe’s healthcare systems face mounting workforce shortages, with over 40% of doctors nearing retirement age in several countries. [7] As healthcare teams become increasingly overstretched, the need for smart, integrated tools that enhance care continuity and clinical efficiency has never been more urgent.
Technology offers part of the solution. Platforms that coordinate care, support clinical decision-making, and automate routine tasks can reduce the burden on clinicians, close care gaps, and ultimately prevent avoidable hospital visits, especially for patients with severe asthma.
The solution
UpHill® Route is an evidence-based digital platform designed to orchestrate, coordinate, and streamline patient care journeys across health systems. Acting as a care orchestration solution, it enables healthcare professionals to deliver consistent, guideline-compliant care while reducing unnecessary emergency visits and hospital admissions.
Certified as a Class IIa medical device, UpHill Route supports clinical teams by transforming validated care pathways into actionable, digital workflows. These care journeys are continuously adapted based on real-time data from electronic health records (EHRs), patient self-reports, and remote monitoring tools. As a result, the platform creates dynamic, personalised care plans that evolve with each patient’s condition.
The platform enables:
- Care coordination: Supports multidisciplinary teams by assigning, tracking, and automating tasks aligned with clinical best practices.
- Decision support: Provides HCPs with locally validated, step-by-step guidance tailored to specific medical conditions.
- Continuity of care: Ensures patients remain under active follow-up, even across different care settings or stages of treatment.
Proven use cases of UpHill Route include:
- Pre-operative optimisation: Streamlining care before surgical procedures.
- Chronic disease management: Enhancing integration in complex, multi-unit care settings.
- Oncology care pathways: Supporting timely, coordinated interventions in cancer treatment.
Through its flexible, modular design, UpHill Route bridges gaps in care, automates routine clinical activities, and enhances communication across care teams, ultimately improving outcomes for patients and operational efficiency for healthcare providers.
Expected impact
The Route2Spain project is designed to address a critical challenge in healthcare: the management of patients with severe asthma. The desired outcome of the project is to improve the control and quality of life of these patients by enabling earlier identification of those at high risk. At the same time, it aims to strengthen healthcare systems and contribute to the development of a more sustainable health economy in Europe.
At the heart of this project lies a digitally orchestrated clinical pathway that automates essential steps in asthma care, such as data collection, patient communications, and clinical documentation, while also supporting healthcare professionals with timely insights and decision-making tools. This pathway is composed of five main phases:
- Pre-consultation: Where symptoms, treatment adherence, biomarkers, and past emergency visits are reviewed in advance to better prepare the clinician.
- Stratification: Offering real-time visibility into each patient’s phenotype, respiratory function, and risk history, to ensure early and targeted interventions.
- Automatic alerts: Triggered by signs of clinical deterioration (e.g., increased use of rescue medication or changes in respiratory flow), which allow for rapid action before an exacerbation occurs.
- Visibility of emergency department episodes: Ensuring that the care team has access to information on acute treatments and follow-up needs after an urgent event.
- Post-crisis follow-up: Guiding healthcare professionals in identifying and prioritizing patients who require more intensive monitoring or tailored support after a severe episode.
These structured, automated interventions generate a series of expected outcomes:
- Improved preparation for clinical consultations,
- Accurate stratification of patients,
- Timely alerts that prevent deterioration,
- Multilevel visibility of care progression, and
- Better-informed, more engaged patients.
Together, these improvements result in fewer hospitalisations, shorter time to intervention, and more efficient use of clinical resources.
By reducing variability in care, enabling earlier interventions, and automating routine tasks, Route2Spain strengthens healthcare systems with scalable digital infrastructure. In the long term, it supports a sustainable health economy by reducing unnecessary hospital costs, avoiding duplication of services, and improving chronic disease outcomes through proactive management.
External Partners
- UpHill S.A. (Consortium Leader)
- Hospital Universitario Puerta de Hierro Majadahonda
- Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge
- Hospital Universitari Joan XXIII de Tarragona
References
[1] World Health Organization (WHO) (2024) Asthma. Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/asthma (Accessed: 5 November 2024).
[2] Farre, R. and Navajas, D. (2015) ‘Prone position in acute respiratory distress syndrome: the time has come’, European Respiratory Review, 24(137), pp. 474–476.
[3] British Thoracic Society (2000) ‘BTS guidelines for the management of community-acquired pneumonia in adults’, Thorax, 55(7), pp. 566–574.
[4] Sadatsafavi, M., Rousseau, R., Chen, W., et al. (2014) ‘The preventable burden of productivity loss due to suboptimal asthma control: a population-based study’, Chest, 145(4), pp. 787–793. doi: 10.1378/chest.13-1619.
[5] European Respiratory Society (ERS) (2020) ‘Asthma management: a new era’, Breathe, 16(3), pp. 1–5. Available at: https://publications.ersnet.org/content/breathe/16/3/200161 (Accessed: 5 November 2024).
[6] Sociedad Española de Médicos Generales y de Familia (SEMG) (2023) Guía Española para el Manejo del Asma (GEMA 5.3). Available at: https://www.semg.es/images/2023/documentos/GEMA_53.pdf (Accessed: 5 November 2024).
[7] ephconference.eu. ‘WHO/Europe Report: Health and care workforce in Europe: Time to act. Available at https://ephconference.eu/repository/conference/2022/Press%202022/Full%20press%20release%20WHO%20Report.pdf. (Accessed: 22 July 2025).
Members
CLC/InnoStars: Spain
GSK is a global biopharmaceutical company whose purpose is: together, to unite science, technology, and talent to get ahead of disease so that by the end of 2030, we will have left a positive mark on the health of more than 2.5 billion people, including 1.3 billion of them from low-resource countries. Our goal is to help prevent diseases in the first place and to stop or slow down their consequences by intervening earlier.
Key Activities in Research and Developement
R&D is central to our purpose to get ahead of disease together. In 2023, our R&D expenditure was £6.2 billion, up 13% AER and 14% CER on 2022, driven by investment across the portfolio.
The convergence of science and technology is changing discovery and development, allowing us to make advances once thought impossible. We have built one of the world’s largest genetic datasets, giving us an unprecedented level of understanding of the human immune system and end-to-end insight into the underlying biology of disease. This gives us a transformative opportunity to predict and pre-empt disease and propel all aspects of R&D, reflected in our broad pipeline.
We have bolstered our pipeline and technology capabilities through strategic business development, actively seeking out new, differentiated opportunities in diseases with high patient need. We have approximately 71 medicines and vaccines in development, further strengthening our position as a pioneer in the field of healthcare innovation.
Key Activities in Corporate Innovation
We get ahead of disease together by preventing and treating it with innovation in vaccines and specialty medicines. Our R&D approach combines our scientific focus on the immune system - with the use of advanced technologies.
We are working to deliver a new generation of differentiated, needed vaccines and medicines in four core therapeutic areas where we have the strongest expertise, and where significant patient need remains: infectious diseases, HIV, respiratory/immunology, and oncology.
Technology powers all aspects of our R&D. We use human genetics and functional genomics, along with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), to deeply understand the patient, human biology, and disease mechanisms. This is leading to real breakthroughs for tackling a range of conditions, such as liver disease, or transforming HIV treatment and prevention.
We believe the powerful combination of science and technology holds the key to fundamentally transforming medical discovery for the better, making the R&D process more dynamic, improving success rates and shaping how even the most challenging diseases, like neurological conditions and cancer, can be both prevented and treated.
Key Activities in Social Innovation
We are guided by our purpose to unite science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together. We deliver this purpose considering the social, environmental and governance impacts across everything we do, from the lab to the patient.
We've identified six areas of responsible business that matter most to us: access; global health and health security; environment; diversity, equity and inclusion; ethical standards and product governance.
CLC/InnoStars: Spain
Partner classification: Municipality / City, Hospital / University Hospital
Servicio Madrileño de Salud (SERMAS) is the public health provider of the region of Madrid. SERMAS belongs to the Spanish National Health System and provides services to more than 6 million citizens through 38 hospitals and 424 primary care centres. SERMAS is an international reference for high-specialized medicine; it is equipped with state-of-the art stage technologies and characterized by high-qualified health professionals distributed in three domains: primary care, hospital care and emergency care through SUMMA 112. SERMAS has one of the best public primary care systems in good coordination with hospital care and social services in order to provide integrated care and achieve real impact on patients and families. In order to improve health research management and coordination, SERMAS works with 13 Research Foundations that support from the economic and administrative point of view research and innovation that originates at university hospitals, primary care, the emergency medical service and public health covering all areas of specialties and including communication and information technologic departments. These public research foundations focus on innovation and translational research, seeking for real outcomes in healthcare. SERMAS is committed to ensure the continuous improvement of quality.
Key Activities in Social Innovation
Healthcare provision, Payers
Key Activities in Business Creation
Technology Transfer, Testing & Validation
Key Activities in Education
Medical faculties, Healthcare professional education/training
CLC/InnoStars: Spain
Partner classification: Education, Research, Tech Transfer, Clusters, Other NGOs, Hospital / University Hospital
With a staff of over 51,700 professionals, the Catalan Health Institute (ICS) is the largest public health services company of Catalonia, that provides health care to nearly six million people across the country. As a reference entity of the public health system, the aim of ICS is to improve people’s health and quality of live, through the provision of excellent health services in his 8 Hospitals and 949 primary care centers and local consultancy, regarding both the promotion of health and the treatment of diseases, from the most prevalent to the most complex ones. Also, our organization includes research - 7 Institutes - , and education. All of our activities embrace innovation and knowledge transfer as a guarantee to continuously improve the attention that the institution offers to the citizens.
Institut Català de la Salut (ICS)
Institut Català de la Salut, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 587, 08007 Barcelona, Spain
CLC/InnoStars: Spain
Partner type: Linked/Affiliated Party
The IISPV is a biomedical research institute placed in the province of Tarragona (Catalonia, Spain) that combines clinical and basic research in order to accelerate the translation of knowledge to the benefit of patients. Founded in 2005, the institute integrates the Hospital Universitari de Tarragona Joan XIII, the Hospital de Tortosa Verge de la Cinta, the Hospital Universitari Sant Joan de Reus, the Hospital Universitari Institut Pere Mata and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in order to bring together and manage biomedical research and innovation in the territory. The IISPV aims to be a national and international reference centre in biomedical research and translation, at the service of the population, linking the health centres to the community.
Fundació Institut d’Investigació Sanitària Pere Virgili (IISPV)
Hospital Universitari Sant Joan de Reus Avda. Josep Laporte, 2 Planta 0 - E2 color taronja 43204 Reus (Tarragona), Spain
Parc Sanitari Joan XXIII c/ Doctor Mallafrè, 4 43005 Tarragona, Spain