JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The management of Neurodegenerative Diseases (NDDs) in older population is usually demanding and involves care provision by various healthcare services, resulting in a greater burden to be placed on the healthcare systems in terms of both costs and resources. The convergence of various health services within the integrated healthcare models, enabled and adopted jointly with information and communication technologies (ICTs), has been identified as an effective alternative healthcare solution. However, its widespread implementation faces formidable challenges. Both the development and implementation of integrated ICTs are linked to the collaboration and acceptance of different groups of stakeholders beyond patients and healthcare professionals, with reported discrepancies in the needs and divergent preferences amongst these groups.

Objective:

Complementing a previous publication, that reported on the needs and requirements of end-users in the development of the EU funded project Personalized Integrated Care Solution for Elderly “PROCare4Life”, the current paper aims to report about the opinions of other key stakeholders in the fields of academia, media, market, and decision makers, for improving the acceptability and implementation of an integrated ICT-based healthcare platforms supporting the management of NDDs.

Methods:

The study included 30 individual semi-structured interviews, that took place between June and August 2020 in five European countries (Germany, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain). Almost all the interviews were done on the web, except for participants who asked to be interviewed in-person. In that cases the Covid-19 PROCare4Life safety procedures were applied.

Results:

Two themes and five sub-themes were identified. Users’ engagement, training and education, and the role played by the media were identified as strategic measures to ensure acceptability of the ICT healthcare platforms. Whereas sustainable funding and cooperation with authorities were foreseen as additional points to be considered in the implementation process.

Conclusions:

The gradual transformation and responding to the various needs of the end-users in the ICT-based healthcare platforms requires a shared dialog between different experts such as: researchers, policy makers, technology developers, and media experts. Addressing typical barriers for ICT adoption among older population such as technology complexity and digital literacy among the potential users, need to be considered by providing a tailored system. Future projects are required to plan and budget training measures for end-users, ensuring that the time needed for training on the technology is planned for. Furthermore, overcoming costs of technology adoption can be facilitated by offering tailored pricing models. A comprehensive research on the users’ needs shall comprise four main aspects: Identifying the challenges associated with illness; researching the digital skills and preferences of the target groups; adjusting the ICT functionalities to the real unmet needs of end users; and the inclusion other key stakeholders in the research.