On 4 and 5 September 2024, the VALUE-Dx consortium gathered at the NH Valencia Center Hotel in Valencia, Spain, for their highly anticipated Closing Conference. This event provided a unique opportunity to reflect on the project’s journey and to discuss the final results, recommendations, and outcomes. With 83 attendees, including consortium members and invited stakeholders, the conference was a vibrant forum for sharing knowledge and ideas.
Key presentations covered a range of topics, including the clinical algorithm for diagnosing community-acquired acute respiratory infections (CA-ARTI), interoperability networks for AMR clinical research, and the findings from the two clinical studies, ADEQUATE and PRUDENCE. The social sciences team presented their qualitative research, while the health-economics teams delivered an economic evaluation of diagnostic tools for CA-ARTI. Lively panel discussions delved into the user requirement specifications and technical roadmap, as well as into the role of rapid diagnostic tests for CA-LRTI.
The dynamic debates were further enriched by some of the intriguing results from the clinical trials. A key takeaway from the conference was indeed that evaluating a point-of-care test involves much more than assessing a biological test; it also requires examining the behavioural interventions that surround its use.
The Closing Conference marked the conclusion of a remarkable 5.5-year project. Consortium members celebrated the successful collaboration between academia and industry, bringing together experts from diverse fields such as microbiology, infectious diseases, and health economics. While it took time to bridge these different perspectives, the result has been a strong, cohesive partnership that laid the groundwork for ongoing impactful research. The consortium is optimistic about continuing this important work and is eager to pursue more complex interventional studies, potentially in collaboration with the European Respiratory Society.
