The European Blueprint on Digital Transformation of Health and Care for the Ageing Society reflects a shared policy vision of European policy makers, civil society, professional organisations and industry. Such a shared vision is an essential instrument to mobilise investments and guarantee the commitment of all actors (including industrial players, regional authorities, professional and civil society organisations and multi-stakeholder platforms such as the EIP on AHA) in the digital transformation of health and care for the ageing society.
Within the context of the WE4AHA support action, empirica is responsible for the further development of the Blueprint. Part of this involves identifying Blueprint user scenarios and to this end, the concept of creating personas was employed. The creation of personas is one of the proven successful concepts that enable companies to understand their potential users more, by considering more closely their needs, aspirations, attitudes, dreams, and other relevant characteristics.
empirica guided the development of 16 personas as a joint effort by Blueprint partners. All 16 personas represent realistic health and care needs of certain groups in the society. The goal pursued by Blueprint partners in creating detailed profiles for each persona was to enable stakeholders to identify what is important to each individual. Stakeholders would thus be able to identify gaps and pinpoint to possible ICT solutions that target those unmet needs, as well as design new solutions that better target the personas’ needs, advancing the digital transformation of health and care.
The 16 personas developed so far represent 12 different “population segments”. These segments are classified according to certain age or life course groups and their corresponding health and care needs. Out of the 16 personas developed, 12 were finalised as of the end of September 2018. These are illustrated in the matrix below.
Most recently, on 14 November 2018, empirica was present at an EIP for AHA B3 Action Group on Integrated Care meeting where the 12 personas were showcased and discussed together with stakeholders. The purpose of the meeting was to collect stakeholder feedback on employing the personas concept, as well as on the presentation of personas (in this case, in poster format). Stakeholders were also able to provide early suggestions for possible use case scenarios suitable to the personas’ needs.
The Blueprint work will identify up to 10 priority use cases and/or scenarios as specified in the Blueprint objectives. The exact number of use cases or scenarios to be developed will be decided at a later stage. These will address the specificities of each persona and will rely on identifying and matching possible ICT solutions to identified unmet needs.
