The Market Place event in the context of the MasterMind project
MasterMind in a nutshell
MMind aims to make high quality depression treatment more widely available for adults suffering from the illness. This because of its high incidence, social cost and proven clinical effectiveness of ICT in its treatment.The goal is to assess through implementation at scale (approx 5.000 patient overall) the impact of cCBT and collaborative care facilitated by video conference across 11 countries.The project will identify barriers and success factors to implementing the services on a large scale in different political, social, economic, and technical contexts and from the perspective of different stakeholders such as patients, professionals, and health insurances.
MMind will deliver a large scale implementation of the telemedicine services in the participating regions, while creating the necessary evidence and guidance for all other regions to follow at the end of the project.
Even though MMind has only been “in operation” since the 1st of March 2014, the project has already achieved important results that can be transferred to regions outside the consortiumas well as important lessons learned for existing and future projects. Currently, the most important of theseis the creation of a “Market Place” concept for the transfer of knowledge between regions.
Why a Market Place?
The first intention, when preparing the event, was to arrange for the partners a well organised event showing the different IT solutions for cCBT actually in the market, and giving them the opportunity to talk to the different providers, all in one single place. The final objective was to present, with the support of the experienced partners (the 1st wavers), a selected number of options available in the market that could beemployed (including translation, localisations, etc.) and invite the providers to present their solution in astructured way.
After a discussion with the experienced partners, however, it became clear that the key issue to implementing cCBT was not the software, but a set of conditions and requirements, such as the organisational issues, or the motivation of professionals, among others. The knowledge on these key requirements was to be found within the consortium, with the experienced partners. It was then a matter of structuringthe transfer of this knowledge in an expedient way and facilitating the interaction with the less experienced partners (the 2nd wavers).
The plan
The event was planned as a practical way to facilitate the knowledge transfer between the partners whowere already implementing cCBT and those whowerestarting to plan their cCBT roll-out and wanted to learn from their more experienced colleagues.
The event enabled the experienced sites to transfer knowledge and information on the practicalities of planning and implementing cCBT services in different healthcare contexts. This was the central activity devoted to facilitating the roll out of the cCBT pilotswhile minimising the time needed and providing guidance and methodology to facilitate the adoption by the project partners.
Objectives of the Market Place day
The Market Place event had the following main objectives:
- To empower the new pilots by providing them with early information and learning on developing a model for cCBT and implementing cCBT in their regions. This includes cCBT as part of a blended approach.
- To enable them to have visibility of processes used to select suppliers from the market to provide the cCBT package.
- To build relationships between the various pilots and promote open dialogue and sharing of knowledge.
- To collate the information and learning pointsfrom the event into a document.
- To elaborate, based on the experience, the lessons learned and the knowledge acquired, a first draft of a guideline for implementing cCBT in a pilot, beyond the MMind consortium.
In order to enrich the contributions and to involve as many stakeholders as possible, the event was open to all partners directly and indirectly part of the implementation of the cCBT.
Collection of background information
Key facts and data about the experienced partners and how they have implemented their pilot was collected in a structured way (using a template), in order tohiglight the differences and commonalities. As important as the technical aspects, the organisational ones were also identified for each site. Finally, the view of each partner on DOs and DON’Ts was included.
As a result, the new adopters had a clear picture of the experienced sites and a transversal view across all of thembefore the event. This facilitated the exchange of information and helped them to plan for the event as well as for their own implementation.
Structure of the event
The event was organised in parallel workshops, each one focusing on one trial site in a particular country, i.e. the different 1st wave trials in Scotland, Germany,the Netherlands, Denmark, or Norway.Each workshop involved sharing of information and group discussion on that particular trial.
There was a standard approach to each workshop and facilitators were focused on delivering the key learning points around what is critical to the roll-out of cCBT and points of interest to the new sites.
The workshops focused on the following topics:
- Models of delivery, care pathway and referral mechanism
- The license and selecting the license for cCBT
- Technical requirements and deployment of cCBT
- Staff and training to support roll-out
The next steps
On top of the interaction between the participants in the form of workshops, the information captured via the questions/answers and comments from the participants helped to subtantially enrich the initial content and was considered by the “beneficiaries” as a key turning point in the process of developing their pilots.
The consortium decided that, when gathered and well structured, information about the experience could serve as the basis for a reference manual for implementing cCBT services at local/regional level. The consortium is aware that this is an ongoing exercise that will mature and refine as the project develops andthat the premises will be revised and polished as MMinddeploys the service. However, we consider the proposed document a reference that other organisations interested in joining the MMind activities could apply and that would facilitate the uptake.
Deployment of the MMind framework – added European value
The MMind Market Place manualis to be one of the pillars to deploy the cCBT service within the consortium, as well asto encourage and help organisations external to the consortium that are interested,to join by facilitating the adoption process. Another main pillar is to be the set of protocols and indicators that will be applied systematically by all the pilots, allowing for the aggregation of data that will have a statistical value and will be analysed employing a common methodology.
In this way, we consider that MMind will be able to open up to other organisations and facilitate the uptake of the service in a broader geographic coverage, without jeopardising the necessary homogeneity and quality of the data and information acquired in the MMind pilots, thus being compliant with the obligations and responsibilities stated in the contract. The Market Place approach and framework have proven to serve as an efficent tool for the transfer of knowledge and experiences between regions in Europe for telemedicine services within MMind in a pragmatic and cost efficent process. The conceptcan easly be adopeted to all other types of telemedicine services and other projects. Therefore, we believe that it should be included in other future large scale implementation projects as a requirement.