The Expert Advisory Board EXABO is a pan-European internet platform to answer questions regarding rare respiratory diseases, which has been developed in the context of the European Reference Network for Rare Lung Diseases (ERN LUNG).

The platform is primarily aimed at patients and care team members but is openly accessible by anyone who wants to ask a question related to rare respiratory Diseases. The service doesn’t provide diagnosis or personal treatment recommendation, but allows patients to obtain useful input concerning their disease.

Expert members of ERN LUNG are grouped according to the area of rare disease and country or language zone. Each of these expert groups is led by at least one moderator who assigns each incoming question to an expert to give the answer to the question or start a discussion session with some or all of the experts before the response is published. Each time an expert is chosen by a moderator to answer a question the expert receives an e-mail notification in addition to an announcement on the platform.

For quality purposes, the answers given are checked by the associated moderator and subsequently published in the archive to share the information with others interested in the topic. In order to take advantage of ERN LUNG's Europe-wide network, a question that could not be fully answered in a country or language zone-specific panel of experts will be translated into English and discussed across Europe in an expert group of rare respiratory diseases. Afterwards the answer is sent back to the responsible moderator, translated back into the source language and published.

The experts involved receive an anonymised version of the question, thus personal data are not exchanged.

The Internet platform has been available under the URL exabo.eu in the beta version since March 2019. It is currently in English and German, and is already being used.

The aim is to make the expertise in rare respiratory diseases easily accessible without the patient having to travel. The system can easily be adapted to the needs of other ERNs and inquiries are welcome.