Integrating care for older people with complex needs: key insights and lessons from a seven-country cross-case analysis

Background: To address the challenges of caring for a growing number of older people with a mix of both health problems and functional impairment, programmes in different countries have different approaches to integrating health and social service supports.

Objective: The goal of this analysis is to identify important lessons for policy makers and service providers to enable better design, implementation and spread of successful integrated care models.

Methods: This paper provides a structured cross-case synthesis of seven integrated care programmes in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, the UK and the USA.

Key findings: All seven programmes involved bottom-up innovation driven by local needs and included: (1) a single point of entry, (2) holistic care assessments, (3) comprehensive care planning, (4) care co-ordination and (5) a well-connected provider network. The process of achieving successful integration involves collaboration and, although the specific types of collaboration varied considerably across the seven case studies, all involved a care coordinator or case manager. Most programmes were not systematically evaluated but the two with formal external evaluations showed benefit and have been expanded.

Conclusions: Case managers or care coordinators who support patient-centred collaborative care are key to successful integration in all our cases as are policies that provide funds and support for local initiatives that allow for bottom-up innovation. However, more robust and systematic evaluation of these initiatives is needed to clarify the ‘business case’ for integrated health and social care and to ensure successful generalization of local successes.