Although the provision of collaborative service models bringing together the usual silos of social care, health care and informal support have started to emerge in some regions in Europe, much remains to be done to deliver truly integrated care which meets people’s needs.

BeyondSilos aims at further spreading ICT-enabled, joined-up health and social care for older people by developing, piloting and evaluating integrated services based on two generic pathways in a multicentric approach, making extensive use of knowledge and experience gained among early adopters of integrated eCare in Europe. Third sector organisations and family/informal carers, where appropriate, are included in the information loop in order to facilitate service users to self-care and live independently.

Coordinated by the University of Twente, the synergies of BeyondSilos and other European eHEIC Projects (SmartCare and CareWell) was studied from the perspectives of ‘human factors’ in e-health enabled integrated care, resulting in the development of the 7Habits, a framework for sustainable implementation of  avant-la-lettre integrated care in regions across Europe and beyond.

Project website: http://beyondsilos.eu/project/.