Abstract
Short introduction/background summary: The academic field of personalized integrated care is still growing. The number of publications indexed in PubMed has tripled over the last 10 years, to nearly 8.000 publications in 2021. Still, in this literature there is no agreement on the concept of personalized integrated care (personalised care institute, 2023; Goodwin, 2016; Valentijn et al., 2013; Zonneveld et al., 2018).
In its strategy for 2022 – 2026, IFIC notes that personalized (or person-centered) integrated care is usually defined by the problems it aims to solve, which are fragmentation of care and an under-resourced, medically oriented primary care (IFIC, 2021). IFIC recognizes a continuum of definitions, and suggests care systems adopt a definition that meets the needs of the community (IFIC, 2021). However, from a research as well as a practical perspective, we believe a general, or universal definition of integrated care is useful, or even necessary. Therefore with our research we aim to present ingredients for a definition of personalized integrated care, as a step towards a general definition.
Who is it for: Service users, professionals, researchers, policymakers in personalized integrated care.
Who we involved and engaged with: In order to set the scope, we engaged with practitioners, researchers and policy makers during conferences and projects.
What did we do: We performed a Systematic Concept Analysis using Rodgers’ seven-stage evolutionary methodology (Rodgers, 1989), combined with the practical implications proposed by Foley & Davies (2017). In our search strategy, we used the narrow search rule (IFIC, 2022) next to the Mesh-terms on Integrated Care and Person-Centered Care (Pubmed, 2022) and search terms based on an existing concept analysis on person-centered care (Morgan & Yoder, 2012). Included papers were analyzed using content analysis in Altas.ti focusing on Attributes, Antecedents, Consequences and Empirical References, being the core elements of concept analysis.
The results we got: Our search in the databases CINAHL, PsychINFO, Pubmed, Medline, Academic Search Premier, Business Source Premier, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection and the Cochrane Library resulted, after application of in- and exclusion criteria, in a realm of 65 papers.
Preliminary results of this concept analysis will be presented.
The learning for the international audience
Insights so far include the wide array of attributes (characteristics) of personalized integrated care. The most encountered attributes are interdisciplinary collaboration, organization of care around patients needs and patient empowerment. We expected to see an evolution over time of the concept, but this seems less clear-cut than anticipated. The majority of included studies are from the last decade.
What are the next steps: We will present and discuss our preliminary findings with the participants of ICIC24 who form our target audience. This will help us to finetune our preliminary findings, and add in the development of a clear, balanced definition, which in turn can inform practice, research and policy.