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The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the urgency of better chronic disease management and the importance of making it an integral part of the recovery agenda in Europe. This paper aims to explore the shift towards digital and integrated care systems in Europe.

In this viewpoint paper the Expert Group for Integrated Care and Digital Health Europe (EGIDE) group argues that an orchestrated shift towards integrated care holds the solution to the chronic disease pandemic.

The development of integrated care cannot happen without shifting towards a digitalised healthcare system via large-scale initiatives like the European Health Data Space (EHDS) and the involvement of all stakeholders.

The EGIDE group has identified some foundational principles, which can guide the way to realise the full potential of the EHDS for integrated care and can support the involved stakeholders’ thinking.

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) and virtual visits have the potential to transform care delivery and outcomes but require intentional planning around how these technologies contribute to integrated care. Since maturity models are useful frameworks for understanding current performance and motivating progress, the authors developed a model describing the features of RPM that can advance integrated care.

This work was led by St. Joseph's Health System Centre for Integrated Care in collaboration with clinical and programme leads and frontline staff offering RPM services as part of Connected Health Hamilton in Ontario, Canada. Development of the maturity model was informed by a review of existing telehealth maturity models, online stakeholder meetings, and online interviews with clinical leads, programme leads, and staff.

The maturity model comprises 4 maturity levels and 17 sub-domains organised into 5 domains: Technology, Team Organisation, Programme Support, Integrated Information Systems, and Performance and Quality. An implementation pillars checklist identifies additional considerations for sustaining programmes at any maturity level. Finally, the authors apply one of Connected Health Hamilton's RPM programmes to the Team Organisation domain as an example of the maturity model in action.

This work extends previous telehealth maturity models by focussing on the arrangement of resources, teams, and processes needed to support the delivery of integrated care. Although the model is inspired by local programmes, the model is highly transferable to other RPM programmes.

Undoubtedly, coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has released unprecedented disruptions and health crisis on people and activities everywhere. The impacts extend to public–private partnership (PPP) arrangements in the construction industry. Concomitantly, PPP pacts are contributing to combat the pandemic. However, literature on the PPP concept in the COVID-19 era remain under-researched. This study aims to review the current literature on PPPs in the COVID-19 pandemic and present the key themes, research gaps and future research directions.

In this study, 29 highly relevant literature were sourced from Web of Science, Scopus and PubMed search engines within the systematic literature review (SLR) methodology. With the aid of qualitative content analysis, the 29 articles were critically analysed leading to the extraction of hot research themes on PPPs in the coronavirus pandemic.

The results of the SLR produced eight themes such as major changes in PPP contracts, development of the COVID-19 vaccines, economic recession, facemasks and testing kits, governance and sustainability of PPPs. In addition, the study reveals seven research gaps that need further investigations among the scientific research community on mental health and post-pandemic recovery plans.

The articles selected for this review were limited to only peer-reviewed journal papers written in English excluding conference papers. This restriction may have taken out some relevant literature but they had insignificant impact on the overall outcome of this research.

To improve the understanding of practitioners in the construction industry on key issues on PPPs in the COVID-19 pandemic, the study provides them a checklist of relevant themes.

As a novel literature review relating PPPs to the coronavirus, it sets the foundation for further research and contributes to practical measures to control the virus.