An Integrated Care Platform System (C3-Cloud) for Care Planning, Decision Support, and Empowerment of Patients With Multimorbidity: Protocol for a Technology Trial

Background: There is an increasing need to organize the care around the patient and not the disease, while considering the complex realities of multiple physical and psychosocial conditions, and polypharmacy. Integrated patient-centered care delivery platforms have been developed for both patients and clinicians. These platforms could provide a promising way to achieve a collaborative environment that improves the provision of integrated care for patients via enhanced information and communication technology solutions for semiautomated clinical decision support. Objective: The Collaborative Care and Cure Cloud project (C3-Cloud) has developed 2 collaborative computer platforms for patients and members of the multidisciplinary team (MDT) and deployed these in 3 different European settings. The objective of this study is to pilot test the platforms and evaluate their impact on patients with 2 or more chronic conditions (diabetes mellitus type 2, heart failure, kidney failure, depression), their informal caregivers, health care professionals, and, to some extent, health care systems. Methods: This paper describes the protocol for conducting an evaluation of user experience, acceptability, and usefulness of the platforms. For this, 2 “testing and evaluation” phases have been defined, involving multiple qualitative methods (focus groups and surveys) and advanced impact modeling (predictive modeling and cost-benefit analysis). Patients and health care professionals were identified and recruited from 3 partnering regions in Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom via electronic health record screening. Results: The technology trial in this 4-year funded project (2016-2020) concluded in April 2020. The pilot technology trial for evaluation phases 3 and 4 was launched in November 2019 and carried out until April 2020. Data collection for these phases is completed with promising results on platform acceptance and socioeconomic impact. We believe that the phased, iterative approach taken is useful as it involves relevant stakeholders at crucial stages in the platform development and allows for a sound user acceptance assessment of the final product. Conclusions: Patients with multiple chronic conditions often experience shortcomings in the care they receive. It is hoped that personalized care plan platforms for patients and collaboration platforms for members of MDTs can help tackle the specific challenges of clinical guideline reconciliation for patients with multimorbidity and improve the management of polypharmacy. The initial evaluative phases have indicated promising results of platform usability. Results of phases 3 and 4 were methodologically useful, yet limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic