SMARTCARE Project: Deploying Integrated Health & Social Services for Independent Living by Older People

SmartCare Project: Joining up ICT and Service Processes for Quality Integrated Care in Europe

Against the background of the European Innovation Partnership on Active & Healthy Ageing, SmartCare aims to define a common set of standard functional specifications for an open ICT platform enabling the delivery of integrated care to older European citizens.

In the context of SmartCare, a total of 23 regions and their key stakeholders will define a comprehensive set of integration building blocks around the challenges of data-sharing, coordination and communication. Nine regions will then deploy integrated health & social services to combat a range of threats to independent living commonly faced by older people, while the others will prepare for early adoption, possibly in the framework of new ICT PSP projects. In a rigorous evaluation approach, the deployment sites will produce and document much needed evidence on the impact of integrated care, developing a common framework suitable for other regions in Europe. The organisational and legal ramifications of integrated care will be analysed to support long term sustainability and upscaling of the services.

SmartCare services will provide full support to cooperative delivery of care, integrated with self-care and across organisational silos, including essential coordination tools such as shared data access, care pathway design and execution, as well as real time communication support to care teams and multi-organisation access to home platforms. In addition, they will empower all older people according to their mental faculties to take part in effective management of their health, wellness, and chronic conditions, and maintain their independence despite increasing frailty.

The SmartCare services build on advanced ICT already deployed in the pioneer regions, including high penetrations of telecare and telemonitoring home platforms. In SmartCare, these platforms are to be opened to cross-sectorial care teams, improving the ability of older people to better manage their chronic conditions at home and deal with their increasing frailty. System integration will be based, whenever possible, on open standards' multivendor interoperability will be strongly encouraged.

This trial will evaluate the functions and impacts of the SmartCare pilot services from the point of view of the different principal roles/stakeholders, such as end users (care recipients), voluntary and non-voluntary informal carers, formal care staff/professionals, managers and fund-holders. Evaluation of integrated care service delivery processes (process evaluation) will improve the current scientifically based knowledge base on barriers and facilitators towards integrated care delivery.

Comparators were chosen to be current delivery of health and social care processes ('normal care'), as provided by pilot sites individually. The project uses local scenarios as the comparator in order to enable the evidence generated to contribute to local decision making on using the technologies. Thus, the control groups were as similar as possible to the intervention groups (receiving 'new care'). In addition, a number of possible confounding factors were measured for all participants.

The overall aim of the scientific studies carried out in SmartCare is: To identify the differences induced by implementing ICT supported integrated health and social care.

Any impact that ICT supported integrated health and social care might have on all users will be the subject of analyses according to the framework presented in the MAST model (Kidholm et al. 2012).

In addition, the objectives that will be tested in SmartCare are:

• Difference in number of contacts to health care.
• Difference in number of contacts to social care.
• Differences in use of health care services.
• Differences in use of social care services.
• Differences in costs.
• Differences in organisational aspects caused by implementing ICT supported integrated care.
• Difference in end-user empowerment.
• Difference in end-user satisfaction.

Inclusion criteria for end users:

• Provided with both health and social care.
• Congestive heart failure: for RSD pilot site.
• Frail elderly: for Aragon pilot site.

Exclusion criteria for end users:

• No exclusion criteria.