Key Points
- UK-Based Pilot Site: Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has been chosen as the exclusive UK site for the major five-year European research pilot, IMPACT-MED.
- Project Scale: Led by Italy’s Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma and Spain’s Medtronic Ibérica, the initiative involves 26 partners across 13 European countries.
- Core Objective: The project seeks to transform digital support, self-management, and clinical care pathways for children, adolescents, and young adults living with Type 1 diabetes.
- Collaborative Tech Integration: The Leeds-based arm of the study integrates advanced clinical platforms, collaborating with industry partners DigiBete and Minimed-Diabeter to deploy remote monitoring tools like CloudCare.
- AI Funding Expansion: Alongside the IMPACT-MED launch, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is expanding its use of clinical artificial intelligence following a £1.5 million funding award from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).
Leeds (The Leeds Times) July 17, 2026 – Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has officially secured its position as the sole healthcare provider in the United Kingdom to participate in the landmark five-year European research pilot, IMPACT-MED. Backed by the European Union’s Innovative Health Initiative Joint Undertaking (IHI JU), this five-year, multinational programme is engineered to revolutionise digital support and clinical self-management for young people diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. By bringing together a vast collaborative consortium of clinical experts, academic researchers, and industry pioneers, the project aims to integrate real-time digital health tools into the daily treatment routines of young patients, shifting modern medicine toward a highly proactive, hybrid model of care.
What is the IMPACT-MED research pilot?
As detailed in the project’s official prospectus, IMPACT-MED is a comprehensive five-year collaborative project addressing fragmented specialized care and clinical silos.
The programme is led by the Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma in Italy and Medtronic Ibérica in Spain. It unites 26 partner organisations spanning 13 European countries, creating a multidisciplinary research network of healthcare providers, academic institutions, technological developers, and patient advocacy organisations.
The primary objective of IMPACT-MED is to develop, test, and scale a “Multidisciplinary Cardio-Metabolic Care” (MCMC) framework. While the broader European initiative focuses on a wide range of cardiometabolic diseases—including hypertension, ischemic heart disease, heart failure, and Type 2 diabetes—the UK-based branch is dedicated specifically to childhood, adolescent, and young adult Type 1 diabetes care.
The pilot aims to demonstrate how continuous remote monitoring and structured digital education can prevent clinical complications, reduce the need for emergency hospitalizations, and improve the daily quality of life for young patients.
Why was Leeds Teaching Hospitals selected as the sole UK site?
As documented by the editorial team of the National Health Executive, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust represents the only National Health Service (NHS) organisation participating in the pan-European initiative. This selection positions the city of Leeds at the very vanguard of international digital diabetes care.
Leeds Children’s Hospital, a subsidiary of the Trust, operates one of the largest and most comprehensive paediatric diabetes services in the United Kingdom.
The specialist paediatric diabetes team manages the day-to-day care of more than 500 children and adolescents across the Yorkshire region.
Additionally, the Trust’s Young Adults Diabetes Service offers continuous clinical pathways as patients transition from childhood into adulthood.
Because of this expansive, established patient demographic and the hospital’s existing digital infrastructure, the site provides a robust, real-world clinical environment to evaluate advanced healthcare technologies. Patients enrolled in both the paediatric and young adult services will be offered the opportunity to safely trial these next-generation digital platforms as part of their standard clinical care.
How will digital tools like Diabeter’s CloudCare transform patient care?
As outlined by clinical reports from the Trust, the trial’s technology framework relies heavily on industry collaborations with Minimed-Diabeter and DigiBete.
The integration of these platforms is designed to move healthcare away from retrospective, appointment-to-appointment monitoring and toward real-time, preventative clinical interventions.
At the heart of the technical architecture is Diabeter’s CloudCare system. This cloud-based software environment automatically gathers and consolidates clinical metrics from a patient’s wearable devices, including continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) and automated insulin pumps.
Rather than requiring patients to manually download and email device logs before a clinic visit, the system presents this stream of metabolic data within a single, unified interface for clinicians.
Through this consolidated system, the Leeds clinical team can monitor entire patient populations simultaneously, setting automated thresholds that alert doctors or specialist nurses when a young person’s blood glucose trend begins to destabilise.
This allows the medical team to intervene proactively, adjusting insulin dosing strategies remotely before acute clinical emergencies occur.
In a statement published by the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust communications team, Dr Fiona Campbell, clinical lead for the children and young people’s diabetes team, remarked:
“This will allow the diabetes team at Leeds Children’s Hospital to explore how remote monitoring and personalised digital education can improve treatment, self-management and quality of care among children, adolescents and young adults living with Type 1 diabetes.”
Furthermore, the integration is augmented by DigiBete, an established digital platform dedicated to clinical training, patient engagement, and structured pediatric diabetes education.
By combining DigiBete’s educational modules with CloudCare’s remote monitoring capabilities, the clinical trial seeks to build a holistic, hybrid clinical environment.
Reflecting on the clinical significance of this development, Maarten Akkerman, chairman of the board at Diabeter, stated:
“With Leeds Teaching Hospitals and DigiBete’s pioneering efforts in digital training and education combined with Diabeter’s remote monitoring driven population management innovation, we are making the next step towards a hybrid care setting.”
The regional implementation of this system has been structurally supported by Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber.
The organisation’s Propel HealthTech accelerator programme, alongside Leeds Teaching Hospitals’ Innovation Pop Up, has actively assisted DigiBete in navigating the complex regulatory, safety, and operational requirements needed to introduce clinical-grade technology directly into NHS workflows.
What is the significance of the £1.5 million NIHR funding for AI?
In tandem with its selection for the European IMPACT-MED pilot, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has been awarded £1.5 million in research funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).
This capital is earmarked specifically to expand the implementation and clinical evaluation of artificial intelligence (AI) across its hospitals.
While the NIHR funding is structurally distinct from the EU-funded diabetes pilot, the simultaneous development underlines the Trust’s broader strategy to integrate automated, data-driven systems into routine healthcare operations.
The trust aims to utilize the NIHR funding to validate and deploy AI algorithms that streamline diagnostics, optimize clinical scheduling, and support clinical decision-making.
Together, these two initiatives establish Leeds as a premier national hub for testing how digital infrastructure can alleviate the operational pressures currently facing the wider NHS.
Background of the Development
The launch of the IMPACT-MED pilot comes at a critical juncture in the global management of Type 1 diabetes.
Historically, managing the condition in children and young adults has been highly demanding, requiring families to perform frequent manual finger-prick blood tests and calculate complex insulin doses multiple times a day.
Over the past decade, the rapid development of continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) and smart insulin pumps has substantially improved physiological control.
However, these individual devices have historically operated on closed, proprietary networks, forcing clinicians to manually gather data from disparate software platforms.
At the same time, healthcare systems across Europe, particularly the NHS, are grappling with severe workforce constraints and growing patient volumes.
The traditional model of diabetes care—relying on scheduled outpatient appointments every three to six months—frequently fails to catch metabolic trends until a crisis occurs, leading to diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) or long-term cardiovascular and renal complications.
To resolve these systemic inefficiencies, healthcare providers have increasingly advocated for “population management” strategies. By utilizing centralized cloud platforms to safely aggregate patient data, clinical teams can transition from scheduled, administrative appointments to dynamic, need-based care.
The IMPACT-MED project represents the culmination of these efforts, building a standardized, regulatory-compliant framework that allows clinical data, digital education, and medical hardware to operate as a single, cohesive ecosystem across diverse healthcare settings in Europe.
The clinical implementation of the IMPACT-MED framework in Leeds is anticipated to yield significant changes for both patients and the wider NHS.
For the primary audience of young patients and their families, this digital integration is predicted to reduce the psychosocial burden of managing a chronic disease. Instead of feeling isolated between clinic visits, patients will benefit from a continuous safety net, knowing their clinical team can spot dangerous trends in real time.
Personalised, app-based education via DigiBete is expected to increase self-care confidence among adolescents, directly translating to improved HbA1c levels (a key indicator of long-term blood sugar control) and a decrease in acute hospital admissions.
For NHS clinicians and healthcare administrators, the pilot is expected to demonstrate a highly scalable workflow model. By shifting routine monitoring to automated cloud systems, clinical staff can prioritize their time toward high-risk patients who require active clinical intervention, thereby maximizing clinic capacity.
If the five-year trial proves successful in Leeds, it is predicted to serve as the blueprint for a wider NHS-wide rollout of remote, hybrid diabetes care.
Furthermore, the real-world data collected through this study will play a vital role in establishing standard European regulatory pathways, paving the way for the continent-wide adoption of integrated, digital-first healthcare solutions.
