JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

C3-Cloud was an EU-funded multinational research project that aimed to facilitate personalized care and increase the empowerment of elderly people living with multimorbidity. ICT4PEM is a framework for the development, implementation, and evaluation of ICT-based interventions primarily targeting patient empowerment.

Objective:

We apply the ICT4PEM to analyze the ICT interventions and evaluation outcomes of the C3-Cloud pilot project with respect to patient empowerment.

Methods:

We used definitions of the ICT4PEM framework to identify and categorize the delivered C3-Cloud ICT platforms and sub-interventions based on their intentional relevance to patient empowerment strategies. We used the same framework to analyze the results from the final pilot evaluation with the purpose to identify the effects on patient empowerment characteristics and patient empowerment consequences, respectively

Results:

Based on the project design documents with pilot application requirements we identified the Patient Empowerment Platform (PEP) used by patients and the Coordinated Care & Cure Delivery Platform (C3DP) used by health professionals as having firm relevance for patient empowerment. The following patient empowerment characteristics were identified: Understanding, Control, Support, and Self-Efficacy. We identified these ICT strategies to achieve empowerment: Education, Communication, Engagement, Feedback, and Monitoring. Results with relevance to patient empowerment were from different assessment tools. We found various levels and a limited amount of supporting evidence for the possible positive effects on all dimensions of patient empowerment characteristics and patient empowerment consequences. This is despite the rather good technical acceptance of the system. Patient empowerment, although the main goal of the C3-Cloud project, was not defined within the project and there were no specific evaluation criteria.

Conclusions:

C3-Cloud was a multinational research project that aims to redefine the care platform for multi-morbid elderly patients by creating common platforms for patients and different members of the care team along with multiple support functions. The ICT interventions of C3-Cloud were robust regarding their potential impact on patient empowerment and patient empowerment characteristic supported by our findings. Similarly, evaluation of C3-Cloud platform components reveals positive patient perceptions with respect to patient empowerment, although the data is limited. Our data also support the use of ICT4PEM as a tool for retrospective evaluation of ICT interventions with respect to their design architecture and results in patient empowerment.