Engaging in international case comparison: How can we learn across borders?

Abstract

Background: Health systems globally are still struggling to roll out system-wide models of integrated health and social care. While pockets of innovation exist they often remain stuck within single jurisdictions, or, worse yet, never expand beyond the pilot phase. Researchers, providers, managers and health system leaders could learn from the experiences of other countries facing similar challenges, however lack a standardized comparative method to take findings from different contexts and relate them back to their own. Aims and Objectives: This workshop will walk participants through one approach to conducting comparative program summaries originally developed by the Commonwealth Fund in the United States and applied to cases of integrated care across three different countries. The template captures key components of integrate care including client access and eligibility, care coordination and transition processes, information management systems, self-management and caregiver supports, program maturity, measures of success, and evaluation. Audience members will learn about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges of adopting this type of comparative work, drawing on the examples presented by a panel of international researchers who have applied the Commonwealth Fund template on integrated care to their original studies SUSTAIN (Netherlands) and iCOACH (Canada, New Zealand). Participants will have the opportunity to go through the exercise of adopting the approach. Participants will be broken up into small groups and given short-form templates that can be applied to their own models of integrated care. Groups will go through the exercise and engage in a facilitated discussion on: 1) whether it can be applied to their contexts; 2) what they can learn from this type of exercise to improve and build on existing or new models; and 3) what is missing and what are the challenges when we try to learn across borders. Target audience: This workshop will be of interest to providers, manager and decision-makers seeking to learn from other examples as they adopt, grow, or spread their own models of care. Researchers will also benefit from this workshop as we tackle the methodological and conceptual challenges of complex comparative case analysis, using a case summary templates as a starting point. Learnings/Take away: Participants of this workshop will learn: How to apply a standardized template to analyze their local contexts. Methods to share knowledge across international borders as a means to further their programs and models of care The values and challenges in engaging in cross-national comparative case analysis

Keywords

• comparative case studies
• analytic methods
• implementation
• shared learning
• international models of integrated care