Balance of the 16th Edition of ICIC 2016; new challenges for integrated healthcare

Integrated Care: new challenges for the health system

Integrated care, which is also known as integrated health, co-ordinated care, integral care, perfect care or trans mural care is a world tendency in Health reforms and new forms of organisation which focuses on the more coordinated and integrated forms of curing. Integrated care can be seen as a response to the fragmented delivery of health and social services which is a recognised problem in many health systems.

The WHO gives the following definition: "Integrated care is a concept which gathers the performance, management and organisation of the services related to the diagnosis, treatment and promotion of health. Integration is a means to improve the services in relation to access, quality, user satisfaction and efficiency".

Health systems and services are currently exercised in a context characterised by fast and dramatic phenomena which require changes which are also fast and dramatic in healthcare.

Care for people with chronic problems is one of the most important challenges facing the health system. The recent incorporation of a universal system of protection for people in the state of dependency now brings in a new element. We are faced by a stage which requires an answer to these new challenges but also ”differently”. It is difficult for a single organisation or a single professional group to be able to give a “magic” and “universal” answer to these new situations. The approach must be different, multidisciplinary and subsidiary; it must require scenarios where each organisation and professional does what they have to but also in cooperation, in an integral organisational model.

The construction of scenarios of integrated attention for chronic patients requires different actions. Proactive care for chronic patients should become a priority on the agenda of departmental and ministerial health policies. The creation of this new scenario requires greater cooperation and the joint leadership of healthcare professionals and the managers, combining a top-down strategy which gives a clear view from the departments to the organisations and professionals, and a bottom-up strategy that learns and is built from local experiences of innovation and good practice.

Artificial intelligence, mental illness, IBM Watson …

The world of artificial intelligence in health is a very important field which has to be explored, as it can help professionals to give support to the clinical decisions and to provide information that was previously unavailable.

Another great theme to highlight was the challenge there is to stop the increase in mental sickness. There was talk of the specific case of Northern Ireland, where there is a high rate of citizens suffering from this disorder or mental pathology. To be able to face this problem, the importance was exposed of educational centres giving good education on child mental illness to be able to palliate and reduce the development of these diseases.

IBM talked about the Watson platform as an improvement to increase the productivity of the professionals and to give power to patients to look after their own illness. In this sense, Watson is capable of understanding natural language and analysing unstructured data to give intelligent replies, because it is capable of learning from subjects, something which is revolutionising current patient monitoring systems.

Conclusions of the meeting

One of the interesting points of the congress was the diversity of experiences and examples of application to integral care in areas such as mental health, collaborative healing or public health, introducing elements of innovation such as the use of digital technologies, the central focus of the patient or the collaboration between different players. An important role was played by all of the knowledge offered on how to promote integral care and what the main barriers are on its implementation. The combination of these contents offered a very broad view of the current state of integral care and the possibility of future improvement.

Presence of TicSalut

Fundació TicSalut is the joint organiser of the Congress along with the International Foundation for Integrated Care (IFIC), PIAISS (Pla interdepartamental d'atenció i interacció social i sanitària), Hospital Clínic de Barcelona (HCB), Fòrum ITESSS and ESADECREAPOLIS. It was present with a stand and presented the My Health poster.

It also took part in three of the roundtables of the congress:

• Benchmarking integrated health and social care information systems in Europe.
• Risk Stratification tools for integrated care: appraisal, deployment and impact in Europe.
• The strategic use of Mobile and Digital Health and Care Solutions.