The stay of the Ugandan researcher in Kronikgune has been supported thanks to the collaboration of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and the Women for Africa Foundation, through their programmes “Bizkaia Koopera” and “Ellas Investigan”.

SAICO, Scorecard for Continuous Assessment and Improvement of Programmes on Integrated Care for multimorbid patients, is a project carried out by Agnes Nakakawa since March 2019 in Kronikgune. It involves exploring the extent to which Enterprise Architecture, Soft Systems Methodology, and Balanced Scorecard approaches can support Implementing and Managing on integrated care for Multimorbid patients (IMM). It is expected to be completed in Uganda this October of 2019.

The main objective is to enable care programmes to perform continuous assessment and improvement of their capacity for IMM. SAICO intends to help a care programme to:

  • Identify strategic control actions that it can undertake to build its capacity for IMM.
  • Perform continuous self-assessment or review of its capacity for IMM and generate feedback for improvement.

SAICO is a multi-dimensional scorecard with a checklist of elements/items that constitute best practices in multimorbidity management and integrated care. Thus, it can be seen as a reference map that can both shape and assess a program’s capacity for Implementing and Managing on integrated care for Multimorbid patients (IMM). Literature has been reviewed on best practices for IMM and findings processed using Soft Systems Methodology. Enterprise architecture approach was adopted to invoke a thinking pattern of business-information technology (IT) alignment. Elements/items associated with reported best practices have been categorized into a multidimensional checklist that synthesizes aspects on IMM with digital technologies.

Once the first draft of the checklist was completed, it went through a validation process. Face and content validity was assessed by Basque researchers and health professionals from Osakidetza. The feedback allowed to refine the checklist. Currently, a new phase of the validation process is taking place, using expert reviews by Ugandan researchers and health practitioners.

The main expected outcome of SAICO is to have a coherent mechanism that provides a holistic perspective of IMM when managing the complexity and heterogeneity of multimorbidity. In addition, Kronikgune will have the opportunity to use SAICO to support continuous assessment and improvement of care programmes on IMM in Basque Country.