The LITIS Initiative: Measuring the Level of eHealth Adoption in the Italian Healthcare Trusts

The Italian Federation of Healthcare Trusts and Municipalities promoted a national initiative (LITIS, Italian acronym for: Levels of Technological Innovation in Healthcare), to assist its members in the governance of the eHealth phenomenon. The LITIS model spans over the complete spectrum of the eHealth support to care and administrative processes, from two perspectives: the Functions F (services for citizens, social / healthcare operators, managers, administrative staff and the Enabling Components C (i.e. indirect factors that are prerequisites to deploy the Functions and handle the change). On the basis of a survey on nearly two thirds of the Italian Public Healthcare Trusts, LITIS produced a taxonomy of eHealth adoption indicators (145 micro indicators in the lower layer; 36 topics,.12 sectors in the intermediate layer; 3 macro area indexes and the "ICLI index", acronym for: Global Index of Innovation Level, at the upper layer) as a decisional tool for effective planning of the sector. The Healthcare Trusts were assigned to 5 "Classes of Adoption", according to their value for ICLI A proposal for a stepwise "meaningful evolution" of the 5 Classes was produced, with an approach similar to the Capability Maturity Model.