LinkCare

LinkCare is a European eTEN project where SINTEF together with Central Norwegian Health Authorities participates. SINTEF is responsible for the technical solutions that are evaluated in the project. Below is an abstract describing the problem and approach:

Despite increased investment in health and social care, many of the traditional difficulties continue to exist and are common to healthcare services in Europe.  Many of these issues concern the processes that underpin and support the delivery of services in specific contexts of non-acute care provision such as Mental Health, Elderly Care, Child Care, and the administration and management of home treatments. For too long the care of patients with chronic conditions has taken place in a compartmentalized fashion.

Furthermore, pushed by the need to maximize population coverage in an increasingly resource limited environment, new models of care delivery are emerging. These models have a common focus on collaboration among professionals with diverse profiles, located in the same or different institutions, linked to different providers and supplying different types of services.

Finally, the interoperability between different components of the system is also a critical issue for successful system implementation in an organisation. At the moment the healthcare systems lack interoperability and standardization both concerning storage, interface to database, system documentation and interfaces to other systems.

In this context, the LinkCare services, based on a standard architecture with interoperability concerns, are designed to contribute to the change in the way care is delivered to chronic patients to overcome the problems associated to fragmentation of care and validate a convergent model of care centered in their treatment.

The main idea for the business case of LinkCare is the provision of services that:

• facilitate the establishment of an European convergent healthcare system that is centered on the chronic patients, coordinated across different levels of the health and community services;
• facilitate ubiquitous and mobile new working practices for health professionals with a multiplicity of working profiles that, in turn, require interoperability with existing information resources.

LinkCare will focus, not only on the idoneity suitability of the platforms, from the technical point of view - interoperability, security, standards and regulations -, but also on the needs and requirements that are specific for the care of patients with chronic health problems - coordination of professionals across time, centred on the patient, and collaboration among different levels of care.

In the framework of the market validation, the consortium will run pilot installations, will establish the requirements to integrate the services in the existing operational/legacy systems, will set up the training plan to successfully validate the platform and will elaborate the deployment strategy on the basis of the outcome of the market and business analysis and the conclusions from the pilots validation.

The 3 test sites, used for the evaluation provide common services for patients with chronic conditions. They are  HCPB in Spain, CNRHA in Norway, and LITO in Cyprus.