Workshop: SCIROCCO: a tool for accelerating the adoption of integrated care
Authors:   Organised by: SCIROCCO Exchange Project Chair persons: Diane Whitehouse - Belgium, Cristina Adriana Alexandru - UK
Published: November 2019

Integrated care is seen as a solution for addressing Europe’s changing demographics and dealing with the fragmented delivery of health and care services affecting numerous healthcare systems.

The SCIROCCO tool is an online participatory tool which helps to facilitate multi-stakeholder dialogues on progress towards integrated care. It does so by: Defining maturity to adopt integrated care in terms of the Maturity Model developed by the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (B3 Action Group on Integrated Care).Assessing the maturity of healthcare systems.Assessing the maturity requirements of good practices.Supporting twinning and coaching for “knowledge transfer” to facilitate the adoption of integrated care and exchange of good practices.

Knowledge transfer is seen as mutually beneficial for involved regions to access evidence and learn about integrated care. In SCIROCCO, there are two variants of twinning: the first has the aim of transferring a good practice to the healthcare system, while the second is about the improvement of a particular aspect of a healthcare system in order to improve integrated care maturity. Twinning is becoming ever more popular as an approach, and - in 2019/2020 - is being used in a number of European projects.

The SCIROCCO tool was evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively. Validity and reliability were evaluated using quantitative analyses while usability and perceptions on impact were assessed using questionnaires and focus groups. It was used by more than 60 healthcare organisations in Europe and beyond during 2016-2018. Most recently, it was tested in twinning and coaching activities, which resulted in the development of local Action Plans outlining steps forward on integrated care for the receiving regions.

As part of the SCIROCCO Exchange project, an enhanced SCIROCCO tool is developed. This tool will improve existing knowledge transfer activities by allowing for the easy searching of assets on integrated care from a variety of sources, supporting improvement planning and checking evolution towards plans.

The objectives of this workshop are: Presenting the main functionalities of the SCIROCCO toolOutlining the results of its overall evaluationDiscussing the experiences that 2 regions have had with using the SCIROCCO tool for knowledge transferPresenting progress and next steps during SCIROCCO Exchange for an enhanced SCIROCCO toolPresenting plans for evaluating the enhanced SCIROCCO toolGathering input from workshop participants on how the enhanced SCIROCCO tool could even better support knowledge transfer in different regions.

Key messages

The experience of regions and evaluation results demonstrate the benefits of the SCIROCCO tool for facilitating multi-stakeholder collaboration and learning towards improving integrated care. The progress and plans for the SCIROCCO Exchange tool, enhanced with the feedback and suggestions of workshop participants, offer promise for even better support for knowledge transfer.