Drilling for ‘New Oil’ in Care Integration – Co-Production of the Concept and Specification of an Integrated Data Centre for Policy Decision Making, Care Planning, and Research in Estonia

INTRODUCTION: Care integration needs to take place on different levels, including that of infrastructure and especially data infrastructure. Only integrated data allow for policy making, care planning, research, and evaluation that spans across different sectors of care and support. METHODS: In the course of an EU-funded reform initiative on integrated care, the Estonian government and various agencies have developed a concept for an integrated data centre, bringing together information from social, medical, and vocational support services. The concept was developed in co-production with many stakeholders. A test data set from all covered sectors, including the pseudonymised data of 17,945 citizens of an Estonian municipality, was created and analysed as a proof-of-concept exercise. RESULTS: The co-production approach resulted in a set of requirements and use cases as well as a specification of premises, processes, and data flows for the data centre. The analysis of the test dataset showed the principal feasibility of the dataset for the intended purposes. CONCLUSION: The concept development phase showed that an integrated data centre for Estonia is feasible per se and helped to specify concrete actions required for its realisation. Strategic and financial decisions from the Estonian Reform Steering Committee are now needed to create the data centre.