As UR-CARE is the flagship project of IBD in Motion - IBDiM GmbH (the business unit of ECCO dedicated to research) and as UR-CARE truly became operational in 2017, efforts were started in parallel to establish the structural basis of IBDiM with a perspective towards future growth and success.

• The nature of the IBDiM Managing Director position  generated the need for a long-term commitment beyond the usual office terms of ECCO: in 2018, Filip Baert assumed the position IBDiM Managing Director.

• For the UR-CARE Steering Committee, the necessity became evident that it should assume the role of the official Advisory Board of IBDiM, while the core task of ensuring fair use of UR-CARE persists.

In this context, legal requirements showed:

o that the position of the UR-CARE Steering Committee Chair had to be kept separate from the position of IBDiM Managing Director.

The main roles of the UR-CARE Steering Committee are:

• To provide governance for the UR-CARE project
• To maintain guidance rules for the fair use of UR-CARE
• To review study project proposals

UR-CARE  aims to continue to be a tool for the IBD Community and to serve study ideas of ECCO Officers in the Committees in the form of individual research projects.

2016: THE UR-CARE STEERING COMMITTEE 

Following the presentation of the UR-CARE platform in March 2016 at the 11^th Congress of ECCO, the UR-CARE Taskforce was succeeded by the UR-CARE Steering Committee that consists of 4 ECCO Officers, Filip Baert (previously ECCO Governing Board), Britta Siegmund (previously ECCO Scientific Committee), Javier Gisbert (ECCO Clinical Research Committee) and Ebbe Langholz (previously  ECCO Epidemiological Committee).

The term length of the UR-CARE Steering Committee members is dependent on them being current member of their ECCO Committee. Until the UR-CARE database set-up is complete, it was decided to extend the term of the Steering Committee members who stepped down from their Committees.

L to R: Filip Baert, Britta Siegmund, Ebbe Langholz, Javier Gisbert

2014-2016: The First UR-CARE Taskforce

The structure of UR-CARE was developed by the UR-CARE Taskforce from 2014 to 2016 through a process of multiple discussions. ECCO Experts from the Governing Board, the Scientific Committee, the Clinical Research Committee, the Epidemiological Committee and representatives of established national and study project IBD databases were involved in this process.

L to R: Axel Dignass, Britta Siegmund, Dana Duricova, Ebbe Langholz, Edouard Louis, Filip Baert, Herbert Tilg, Javier Gisbert, Julián Panés, Pierre Michetti, Tine Jess