Nine deployment regions in the SmartCare pilot project have committed to a challenging task: joining up care provision to older people across the silos of health care, social care and third-sector support. They, as others engaging in care integration, had to plan ahead in order to anticipate how the complex new interventions they would put into place would affect care recipients, informal carers, service providers, care professionals, payers and others.
The SmartCare project used a series of methods and tools to facilitate this process, including requirements analysis, common care pathways and the development of sustainability models for each deployment region.
As part of the sustainability workstrand, the Service Implementation Simulator: Integrated eCare was created. The Simulator allows the different parties to be involved in joined-up health and social care delivery to systematically anticipate what positive and negative socio-economic impacts can be expected to flow from new forms of collaboration. The Simulator is a learning tool associated with empirica’s ASSIST method adopted in SmartCare.
The Service Implementation Simulator can be used to explore potential configurations of ICT-supported, integrated care services. With its help, different ways of setting up a service (in terms of stakeholders involved, service processes, etc.) can be chosen. Using the tool, assumptions can be made for different types of service-related costs and benefits, ranging from direct revenue models to high-level societal goals. Both short- and long-term consequences of each design choice can be explored immediately.
Furthermore, the Simulator can be used to get acquainted with the general ASSIST method. This can be of help to stakeholders planning on using the ASSIST tool in the development of their own service concept.
