Patient-centric Care and Chronic Disease Management: A Stakeholder Perspective

By taking a stakeholder perspective, the paper explores reasons why the political commitment to patient-centric integrated care, facilitated by eHealth applications, is so difficult to meet. In spite of hundreds of pilots, still today there is a dearth of evidence on how to indeed successfully organise such services. Outcomes from a variety of implementation projects supported by the European Union were analysed, focusing on benefits and costs for the diverse stakeholder groups involved or impacted. The re-engineering of the services may result in a considerable shift in these variables between groups. Rendering both positive clinical impacts and a positive (overall) socio-economic return is not sufficient to assure wide acceptance and long-term sustainability. However motivated stakeholders may be, few will operate against their economic interests. Successfully establishing modern eHealth facilitated services is not so much a technical, but a social, organisational, and business innovation. We need to better understand in detail the benefits and costs, or the new 'business models' that go with integrated care for each involved stakeholder group, and the likely impacts for each of them, with a focus on how to best assure a win-win situation for all. Health policy has to respond to this, and a promising approach would be to promote organisational integration with shared budgets and outcome targets.