Editorial: Multi-Actor Collaboration in Healthcare to Address the Emerging Health Needs of an Aging Population

This special issue is nested in the A3 Action Group of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP on AHA), focusing on lifecourse health promotion and prevention of age-related frailty and disease. The ambition is to share knowledge underpinning the transfer of innovations among stakeholders, and facilitate adoption by Regional Health Systems, in different EU contexts. Health and societal challenges require the ever faster availability of new approaches to prevention, diagnostics and care, which pose important sustainability and equity issues to regions. The growing economic burden mandates the adoption of new forms of service provision, that improve sustainability and allow to face the current demographic challenges. The ageing trend in European populations is indeed paralleled by a rise in multimorbidity and comorbidity, and a clustering of chronic diseases often correlated with each other . Coping with multimorbid patients raises issues of clinical management, as it is necessary to follow multiple indications and guidelines (for each individual disease), while embedding lifestyles measures that can significantly influence outcomes. The consequence are therapeutic inconsistencies, redundant diagnostic pathways, while struggling with adherence, and increasing in healthcare costs. Hence the urge to define new care pathways, which are able to take care of the patient, ensuring both the continuity of hospital-territory care, and the integration of social and health interventions. The wide-scale implementation of validated innovative approaches is essential to ensure the quality of services to future generations of citizens in an acceptable range of sustainability, avoiding horizontal cuts that would increase inequalities and worsen health outcomes in the long term. It is therefore essential to set up models that are sustainable in an overall health innovation process, where ongoing structural reforms increase the effectiveness and resilience of our health systems. In this framework, disruptive innovations can address sustainably and appropriately the health needs of citizens. Often, the absence of a coordinated approach to social and health reforms is associated with the inadequate participation of citizens, patients, formal and informal caregivers in their planning, set-up and evaluation. Isolated approaches undermine the evolution towards an integrated and high quality health system, that it is also sustainable, efficient and fair. These difficulties are greater in the older adults population, which has multiple health needs, and minor access to services, for reasons often unrelated to the diseases (e.g. IT gaps, mobility problems, residence in rural areas, etc.). One way to achieve these objectives are ICT enabled integrated health and social care services (ICTIC). The development of digital health tools allows to find new answers to traditional problems in patient management, as well as to improve the services by strengthening the collaboration between the different professionals and caregivers involved inside and outside the health system. Furthermore, digital services improve accessibility, thus ensuring equity for example by making qualified services available also in remote, underserved areas. The advantage of the new organizational models based on ICT-supported integrated care is the potential rationalization of social and health processes that impacts on the containment of health expenditure, and also reduces the social cost of diseases. If appropriately used, ICT based integrated services can contribute to a transformation of the health sector and a substantial change in the business models that underpin it. The technological and digital innovations, if designed in a targeted manner and implemented on the Editorial: Multi-actor collaboration in healthcare to address the emerging health needs of an aging population