Evaluating the maturity of integrated care organizations

Abstract

Introduction: Given the difficulty of measuring and demonstrating the added value of integrated care organizations over traditional ones by using conventional evaluation methods, we used—and adapted—the SCIROCCO Maturity Model for Integrated Care to be considered as a steering tool for integrated care organizations to measure their maturity over time and enable improvements.
 Methods: Three organizations located in Switzerland that have brought together the local hospital (with inpatient and outpatient care services), the nursing home, the day center for elderly people, the home care services and the primary care practice will be evaluated using the adapted SCIROCCO tool and approach (SCIROCCO-POL). The original SCIROCCO validated tool assesses the readiness and capacity of a healthcare system, at the level of a region or country, to adopt and scale-up integrated care solutions by capturing stakeholders’ perceptions of current progress towards integration.¹ Following the SCIROCCO methodology, healthcare stakeholders will be asked to assess (individually and then through consensus-building workshops) the maturity of their integrated care organization along 12 dimensions (e.g. governance, funding, digital infrastructure, process coordination, citizen empowerment). Since we aimed at obtaining a steering tool for integrated care organizations, a revision of the SCIROCCO tool is necessary, so that 1) the description of each dimension is adapted to the language used by local healthcare actors, including non-specialists, in the context of an organization, and 2) the 0-5 rating scales follow the same logic throughout the dimensions in terms of maturity progression. This tailoring and systematization will allow us to build a tool that healthcare organizations can easily use to monitor their level of maturity and make progress towards integrated care. The adapted version of the SCIROCCO tool will be used within three integrated care organizations, allowing for comparison and knowledge transfer.
 Results and next steps: Currently, the evaluation process is ongoing. At the end of the full SCIROCCO evaluation process, management bodies of the three integrated care organizations, in conjunction with their stakeholders, will be invited to define SCIROCCO’s priority dimensions and action plans to address the identified maturity gaps; they will also prepare strategic roadmaps for the three identified priority dimensions. 
 We propose to present the adapted version of the SCIROCCO tool that allows the assessment of an organization’s level of maturity towards integrated care, and to discuss its advantages and more specifically its use as a steering and improvement tool that integrated care organizations can use on a regular basis. 
 ¹ https://www.sciroccoexchange.com/