Abstract
Introduction: As person-centred care becomes the norm in policies world-wide, information presented in the traditional health care siloes (health care, public health, social care) has become less suitable for effective governance. Sound and reliable health and social care information is essential for decision making, improving quality of services delivery and patient outcomes. A crucial source for information is data. Research using social care data to measure performance of the broader health and social care system is rare. Insight is needed in social care data, it’s infrastructure, and it’s potential contribution to integrated performance intelligence.
Aims, Objectives, Theory Or Methods: This work aimed to perform a descriptive evaluation of available social care data in the Netherlands and it’s fitness for purpose and use for integrated care decision making. An exploratory qualitative study was undertaken based on desktop research and semi-structured expert interviews. The interview guide was anchored in OECDs recommendations for health data governance. Experts were sampled from across the micro (social care clients and care professionals), meso (data custodians and stakeholder organizations), and macro (policy and legislation experts) contexts of the Dutch health and social care system. A thematic analysis was undertaken in the approach of Meyer and Avery.
Preliminary Highlights Or Results Or Key Findings: In the Netherlands, there are many social care data entry points, but few of this data is systematically used for measuring the performance of integrated care. The main hindering factors found were: fragmented sources of data, a low interoperability with public health and health care data, and a lack of resources to transfer social care data into useful information sources for professionals, clients, and social care organizations and their integrated care networks. There is potential for interoperability with public health and health care data due to the use of personal identifiers, however social care data is only presented at aggregated level in database sources used for policy, which does not allow for a linkage on individual level, and limits the actionability for professionals, clients, and social care provider organizations and integrated care networks.
Preliminary Conclusion: To foster a learning systems approach for person-centred integrated care the actionability of social care data could be strengthened by prioritizing meaningful data linkages at individual level and investment in transferring data into actionable information for all stakeholders involved.
Implications For Applicability/Transferability, Sustainability, And Limitations: Semi-structured interviews elicited first-hand insights into the use of social care data, filling this knowledge gap in the published literature. Our study is focussed on the Dutch context and exploratory in nature, thus patterns and experiences require testing with a larger sample before they can be generalized.