Realising the True Value of Integrated Care: Beyond COVID-19

Stronger and more resilient care systems and communities are better able to cope, respond and adapt to new challenges and crises such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. They are able to quickly come together to ‘act as one’ and collaborate across disciplines and sectors towards a common goal. This is the essence of integrated care and this is what the International Foundation for Integrated Care (IFIC) stands for – creating a more connected health and care system.

Innovative Integrated Health And Social Care Programs In Eleven High-Income Countries

High-income countries face the challenge of providing effective and efficient care to the relatively small proportion of their populations with high health and social care needs. Recent reports suggest that integrated health and social care programs target specific high-needs population segments, coordinate health and social care services to meet their clients’ needs, and engage clients and their caregivers. We identified thirty health and social care programs in eleven high-income countries that delivered care in new ways. We used a structured survey to characterize the strategies and activities used by these programs to identify and recruit clients, coordinate care, and engage ...

WHO Guideline: recommendations on digital interventions for health system strengthening

The key aim of this guideline is to present recommendations based on a critical evaluation of the evidence on emerging digital health interventions that are contributing to health system improvements, based on an assessment of the benefits, harms, acceptability, feasibility, resource use and equity considerations. For the purposes of this version of the guideline, the recommendations examine the extent to which digital health interventions, primarily available via mobile devices, are able to address health system challenges along the pathway to UHC. By reviewing the evidence of different digital interventions against comparative options, as well as assessing the risks, this guideline ...

Country & Technical Guidance - Coronavirus disease (COVID-19)

All technical guidance by topic and scientific briefs developed by World Heath Organization (WHO).

Leadership for integrated care: a case study

Integration of health services involves multiple interdependent leaders acting at several levels of their organisation and across organisations. This paper aims to explore the complexities of leadership in an integrated care project and aims to understand what leadership arrangements are needed to enable service transformation.

This study provides insights into the interdependencies of leadership across multiple levels and proposes steps to maximise the success of complex transformational projects.

Suitable Scales; Rethinking Scale for Innovative Integrated Care Governance

For organising person centered care, an important issue is how to deal with scale. This addresses what to organise on what level (in the neighbourhood, local, in the region, or national). With the increasing complexity of organising integrated care in networks, scale issues are an ingredient of integrated care governance. However, there is a lack of empirical studies that treat scale as an object of study in itself. Scale is an outcome of the interplay between many different interests, values and perceptions of people involved in the broader social and political processes. Five factors for suitable scales are discussed, emphasising ...

A Collaborative Platform for Management of Chronic Diseases via Guideline-Driven Individualized Care Plans

Older age is associated with an increased accumulation of multiple chronic conditions. The clinical management of patients suffering from multiple chronic conditions is very complex, disconnected and time-consuming with the traditional care settings. Integrated care is a means to address the growing demand for improved patient experience and health outcomes of multimorbid and long-term care patients. Care planning is a prevalent approach of integrated care, where the aim is to deliver more personalized and targeted care creating shared care plans by clearly articulating the role of each provider and patient in the care process. This paper presents a method and ...

Patient-Centered Methods for Designing and Developing Health Information Communication Technologies: A Systematic Review

Chronic disease management and maintaining healthy behaviors to prevent disease are important lifelong considerations. Adherence to prescribed management and behaviors often falls short of physician recommendations, which can result in negative health outcomes. Information communication technologies (ICTs) offer an approach to combat this issue. However, uptake and sustainability of ICTs have mixed results. One reason could be that technologies are often created without an understanding of the complexities of patient needs. Therefore, the intent of this study is to explore the current landscape of patient-centered design and development of health ICTs through a systematic review.

Integrated care for healthcare sustainability for patients living with rare diseases

The increasingly complex and multidimensional care request, combined with the presence of increasingly aware and demanding patients, accentuates the need for new strategies to preserve health systems economic sustainability. Therefore, integration mechanisms reveal an essential condition for ensuring continuity of care. The paper reviews the main literature available on the integration of heal services and relates it to rare diseases.

The literature identifies several system levers for the effective design and implementation of integrated care frameworks, namely: political support and commitment, governance, stakeholder engagement, organisational change, leadership, collaboration and trust, workforce education and training, patient empowerment, financing and incentives, ICT ...

Integrated care for older people (ICOPE): guidance for person-centred assessment and pathways in primary care

The ICOPE guidance for person-centred assessment and pathways in primary care (ICOPE Handbook) helps community health and care workers put the recommendations outlined in the ICOPE Guidelines into practice. The Handbook assists with setting person-centred goals, screening for loss in a range of domains of intrinsic capacity and assessing health and social care needs to develop a personalised care plan. The care plan may include multiple interventions to manage declines in intrinsic capacity, provide social care and support, support self-management and support caregivers. The domains of intrinsic capacity include cognitive decline, limited mobility, malnutrition, visual impairment, hearing loss and depressive ...