Towards person-centered integrated care in Italy

The Commission aims at supporting Italian authorities in providing integrated care to non-self-sufficient people. Today, Italian health and social services are poorly integrated, with little cooperation between the responsible local bodies. Being a regional competence, multiple information systems and databases exist with low interoperability. Further, different assessment tools were developed and are used in parallel. The project will support Italian authorities developing an integrated care model, which will be tested in a few selected pilot areas.

Context 

Over the past decades, Italian authorities have attempted to adopt an integrated care model, but successful initiatives were scattered and limited to a few areas. As a result, each Italian region adopted its own approach, further contributing to large differences and disparities across the country. To tackle this fragmentation, in May 2022 the Italian Parliament adopted a law defining the framework model and standards for the development of assistance in the National Health Service, and through the Italian RRP, it allocated money to build the new infrastructures that should support the provision of integrated care.

Support to be delivered

As a provider of this project, OECD has mapped the existing processes and experiences at local level. On this basis, it will then propose an optimal theoretical model to promote the integration of health and social services, to measure the distance of the current experiences from it. A few regions will then be selected to conduct a pilot on the new defined model. The project also foresees capacity building activities, including training material and self-assessment tools to identify discrepancies from the new model.

Expected results

The implementation of the project contributes to the ongoing reform on strengthening integrated care at the community level to better address the health and social needs of non-self-sufficient people in Italy. The expected long-term effect of this project is greater availability and better quality of health and social care services provided to non-self-sufficient at home.