Digital Care Contribution to the Transformation of User Services
Digital-CACTUS is a European research project funded under the Transforming Health and Care Systems (THCS) Partnership, supported by the European Union's Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme. It aims at investigating how digital technologies (e.g., remote monitoring solutions, digital portals, etc.) can be effectively integrated into healthcare systems to support the care for patients with chronic conditions and multimorbidity.
How can digital solutions be integrated in ways to improve care for patients with chronic conditions?
Understand how digital tools impact patient-clinician relationships
Designing a patient-reported tool to map the care journey of patients
Assessing how digital tools can reduce pain points in the care journey of patients
Chronic care systems are still largely organised around episodic, face-to-face consultations, which can limit continuity of care and responsiveness to patients' day-to-day needs. At the same time, the rapid expansion of digital health solutions offers new opportunities to redesign care pathways and strengthen patient engagement.
Digital-CACTUS was created to address this challenge by exploring how digital tools can transform the organisation and delivery of care for people living with chronic conditions. Rather than simply adding technology to existing models, the project seeks to understand how these innovations can be meaningfully embedded into routine practice to support more coordinated, personalised, and patient-centred care.
To achieve this vision, the project is structured around three interrelated work packages:
Work package 1 examines how the use of digital tools impacts patient-clinician relationships.
This work package will leverage both a multi-country qualitative study involving both patients and clinicians and a meta-synthesis of the medical literature. These two studies will explore the impact of digital tools on communication, trust, and the overall experience of care between patients and clinicians.
Work package 2 develops and validates an innovative patient-reported measurement tool.
This work package will leverage design studies to develop an interactive tool to reconstruct the care journey of patients with chronic conditions. The tool will be implemented by SKEZI, a technological company based in France.
Work package 3 evaluates the potential impact of digital health solutions across healthcare systems.
Using the tool developed in WP2, this work package conducts a large international study to map and compare the care journey of patients in five different countries. Results will be used to understand where and how digital tools could help reduce pain points (i.e., unmet needs, adverse events, unnecessary care) in the care of patients.
