An older Costa Rican living with diabetes, reduced mobility and increasing dependency may already have substantial clinical information within the country's healthcare system. Her consultations, medicines and other health information can be supported through the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social (CCSS) and its digital infrastructure. Yet the people helping her remain at home may need a different set of information: what assistance she requires each morning, whether her mobility has deteriorated, whether her daughter can continue providing care, whether scheduled support actually arrived and what should happen when her circumstances change.
That distinction defines one of Costa Rica's most important digital opportunities. The country does not begin from a blank page. Its health sector has developed the Expediente Digital Único en Salud (EDUS), telehealth capabilities and a national digital-health strategy, while the Sistema Nacional de Cuidados y Apoyos (SINCA) is creating a more coordinated architecture for people experiencing dependency. As explored across the Costa Rica Aging, Long-Term Care & Community Support Knowledge Hub, the next challenge is increasingly about connecting systems around people's lives rather than allowing health, long-term care, disability support and family caregiving to develop as separate information environments.
Digital technology can help Costa Rica do that, but connectivity is not integration by itself. A stronger digital care system must determine what information needs to move, who is permitted to see it, how consent and privacy are protected, what workers are expected to do with it and how technology improves decisions. The objective is not more data. It is more continuous, equitable and accountable support.
Costa Rica already has a substantial digital-health foundation
Costa Rica's digital starting point matters because long-term-care technology does not need to be designed in isolation from the country's wider health transformation.
Within the CCSS, EDUS has established a national digital clinical infrastructure across the healthcare network. Its development has enabled healthcare professionals to access relevant patient information across CCSS services, while the associated application gives users access to functions and information such as appointments, prescribed medicines and elements of their health record.
National policy has moved further. The Política Nacional de Salud 2023–2033 includes innovation, digital health and health technologies as a strategic axis, while the Ministry of Health's Hoja de Ruta de Transformación y Salud Digital 2023–2030 establishes a wider direction for digital transformation.
The digital-health roadmap has been organized around four connected priorities: governance; technological infrastructure and interoperability; digital literacy and change management; and cybersecurity. The Ministry has also created a Dirección de Transformación y Salud Digital, giving digital transformation a clearer institutional home.
These developments are significant for long-term care even though they are primarily health-sector developments. Dependency frequently intersects with chronic illness, medication, rehabilitation, hospital care and primary care. A digitally mature health service therefore provides infrastructure upon which better health and social-care interoperability could progressively be built.
The important caution is that EDUS should not be described as a comprehensive long-term-care record. Clinical information and care information overlap, but they are not identical. Costa Rica's opportunity is to connect them appropriately rather than assume one system can simply absorb the other.
Long-term care needs a different information model
Healthcare records are generally organized around diagnosis, treatment, medicines, investigations and clinical encounters. Long-term care is often organized around functioning, everyday assistance, relationships, routines and the ability to participate in ordinary life.
A useful care record might therefore need to know whether a person can prepare food, transfer safely, communicate preferences, leave the home, manage personal care or remain alone for a period. It may need to identify the contribution of a family caregiver and whether that arrangement is becoming unsustainable. It may also record personal-assistance arrangements, day services, home support or other SINCA-related interventions.
These differences have practical consequences for digital design.
Simply giving more organizations access to more clinical information would not necessarily improve long-term care. Equally, forcing every community support interaction into a medical record could medicalize aspects of people's lives that are fundamentally social and personal.
The stronger model is selective interoperability: different systems retain information appropriate to their functions while agreed data can move across organizational boundaries when there is a legitimate purpose, appropriate authority and sufficient protection.
For a person leaving hospital, that might mean the community support pathway receives the functional information required to prepare for discharge. For a home-care worker observing significant deterioration, it might mean an agreed route exists for relevant information to reach healthcare professionals rather than remaining within a separate service record.
Digital integration is therefore fundamentally about workflow. The technical exchange of data matters because somebody needs to make a better decision as a result.
Interoperability is becoming a national strategic issue
Costa Rica's health-sector work increasingly recognizes this principle.
The Ministry of Health has been developing national interoperability arrangements and in 2025 published the Guía CORE HL7, establishing technical guidance for standardized exchange of clinical information between public and private health systems. Earlier digital-health work also identified opportunities for institutions beyond the CCSS to interact with EDUS under appropriate arrangements.
By September 2026, the Ministry continued to identify national health interoperability as a strategic priority, describing work toward the legal, financial and technical conditions required for clinical information to connect securely across public and private services.
For long-term care, the lesson is not that SINCA should automatically become part of every clinical exchange. It is that Costa Rica is developing standards and governance experience that can inform future care integration.
Any extension into dependency support would require explicit decisions about purpose, permissions and proportionality. Relevant questions include:
- which information genuinely needs to follow a person between health and care services;
- which institution remains responsible for the original record;
- how consent and other lawful bases for information processing are handled;
- how workers receive only the information appropriate to their role;
- how inaccurate or outdated information is corrected; and
- how access is logged, reviewed and protected.
This is where cross-agency data governance becomes as important as technical compatibility. Two systems can exchange data perfectly while still having weak governance over why the exchange occurs.
Operational scenario: discharge information that needs to become a care response
An 82-year-old woman is admitted to a CCSS hospital following a fall. Before admission she lived with her daughter and needed limited help with shopping and heavier household tasks. After treatment she can return home, but her mobility has deteriorated and she temporarily requires more assistance with transfers, bathing and preparing meals.
The clinical record can describe the injury, treatment, medicines and rehabilitation recommendations. The operational question is whether the information needed to support life at home reaches the people capable of acting on it.
A connected pathway would not simply transmit the entire hospital record to a community organization. It would identify the relevant functional changes, expected support requirements, follow-up arrangements and warning signs. The daughter's capacity would also need to be understood rather than assuming that discharge home means she can absorb the additional care.
If the woman subsequently misses rehabilitation, experiences another fall or repeatedly seeks urgent care, those events should not remain isolated within different information systems. They indicate that the transition may not be working.
The value of closed-loop coordination and data exchange lies precisely here: the referral should lead to a known response, and important changes should be visible to the relevant parts of the pathway. Technology supports continuity only when the workflow defines who receives information and what happens next.
SINCA creates a new digital-care opportunity
SINCA was established to articulate and improve services for adults and older people experiencing dependency. Its remit spans different forms of support, including residential care, home-based assistance, personal assistance, health, education, recreation, psychological support and other modalities.
That breadth makes information central to the system's development.
Coordination requires more than a directory of institutions. Over time, SINCA needs sufficient intelligence to understand who requires support, what services exist, where capacity is located, whether assessed need results in actual provision and where gaps persist.
Costa Rica's standardized dependency assessment provides one important element. If dependency can be assessed consistently, aggregated information can help reveal changing population need. Service information can then help identify whether the supply of care matches that need.
The opportunity is substantial. A national care system could increasingly use digital information to support:
- consistent assessment and review;
- navigation toward appropriate services;
- visibility of territorial capacity;
- workforce planning;
- monitoring of continuity and unmet need;
- evaluation of service quality; and
- longer-term planning for demographic change.
But each additional use changes the governance requirement. Information collected to determine an individual's support needs should not automatically be repurposed without appropriate safeguards simply because it may be analytically useful.
Organizations examining similar questions can use the Digital Transformation, AI and Cybersecurity Readiness Assessment to structure discussion about governance, infrastructure, workforce and information risk. It is not a Costa Rican compliance instrument; its relevance lies in testing whether digital ambition is matched by organizational readiness.
Cuidar.cr shows how technology can change access to the workforce
One of SINCA's clearest current digital developments is Cuidar.cr.
Introduced at the end of 2024, the platform enables people with training in care for adults experiencing dependency to register information about their qualifications, experience and availability. Households can use the platform to identify trained caregivers, while the Cuidar+ credential provides a way of evidencing caregiver status.
This is different from an electronic care record. It is digital labor-market infrastructure.
That distinction matters because technology can improve long-term care without directly delivering care. Better information about available workers can reduce search costs for households, make training and credentials more visible and help formalize recognition of caregiving competence.
It can also potentially create useful workforce intelligence. If appropriately governed and analyzed, patterns of worker availability may reveal geographic shortages, demand for particular schedules or mismatches between training supply and household need.
However, a matching platform cannot resolve every employment issue. A caregiver being visible online does not itself guarantee adequate pay, supervision, social protection, continuity or good employment conditions. Nor does a household's ability to identify a worker mean it can necessarily afford to employ that person.
Digital matching therefore needs to sit within the wider technology-enabled care ecosystem rather than being treated as a substitute for workforce and financing policy.
Operational scenario: a successful match still needs a sustainable arrangement
A family supporting a 76-year-old man with Parkinson's disease needs additional assistance in the mornings because his wife can no longer safely provide all personal support herself. They use Cuidar.cr to identify a trained caregiver whose experience and availability appear suitable.
The digital platform has solved an important information problem. Previously, the family may have relied on informal recommendations with limited visibility of training or experience.
But the match is only the beginning of the care arrangement.
The family still needs clarity about duties, working hours, payment, contingency arrangements and what the caregiver should do if the man's condition changes. The worker needs enough information to support him safely without being given unnecessary access to sensitive clinical data. If the caregiver becomes unavailable, the household needs a backup plan because the man's wife cannot simply resume the full role.
Over time, a stronger digital ecosystem could make some of these interfaces easier: verified competence, clearer availability, appropriate care information and better continuity planning. Yet the human relationship remains central.
The operational lesson is that digital platforms can reduce friction around finding support, but they cannot by themselves create a sustainable care workforce. The quality of the resulting arrangement depends on employment conditions, competence, communication and the surrounding care system.
Telehealth can extend reach, but long-term care needs hybrid pathways
Telehealth is another important part of Costa Rica's digital direction. The Política Nacional de Salud 2023–2033 includes expansion of non-face-to-face care within the CCSS network as part of its digital-health objectives.
For long-term care, remote access can be particularly useful when dependency intersects with chronic disease, rehabilitation, mental health or specialist advice. It can reduce travel for people whose mobility is limited and extend specialist input into areas where frequent physical attendance is difficult.
But telehealth should not be confused with remote long-term care.
A video consultation cannot help somebody transfer from bed, prepare a meal or provide respite to an exhausted caregiver. Nor can every clinical assessment be completed remotely. Technology is most useful when it removes avoidable travel or connects expertise while preserving face-to-face intervention where physical presence matters.
This makes hybrid design important.
A rural older person may receive a specialist review remotely while a local professional or caregiver supports the interaction. Rehabilitation advice may be followed between appointments using digital communication while periodic physical assessment continues. A family caregiver may receive guidance without travelling to a specialist center.
The stronger measure of success is not the number of virtual contacts. It is whether remote contact improves access, continuity and outcomes without transferring unreasonable technical or care responsibilities to families.
Digital inclusion is part of service access
Costa Rica's digital-health roadmap explicitly recognizes digital literacy and change management as strategic issues. This is particularly important in long-term care because the population most likely to benefit from digital support may also include people who encounter barriers using it.
Older age does not automatically imply digital exclusion, and younger people with disabilities should not automatically be assumed to be digitally confident. Access depends on connectivity, affordability, devices, literacy, disability accessibility, confidence and whether another person is available to help.
A digital-first care system can therefore unintentionally create a new layer of unpaid work. Adult children may become responsible for appointments, portals, passwords, forms and digital communication because a parent cannot manage the interface independently.
This is why digital exclusion and access should be monitored as an operational issue rather than treated solely as a national connectivity problem.
Good digital design preserves alternatives. Telephone, face-to-face or assisted-digital routes may still be required. The aim is not to keep parallel systems indefinitely for every process, but to ensure that digitalization does not make the ability to operate a device an unofficial condition of receiving care.
Data protection becomes more important as systems connect
Long-term-care information can be exceptionally sensitive. It may reveal disability, cognitive impairment, family relationships, mental health, personal routines, financial circumstances, home access arrangements and the times when somebody is alone.
Costa Rica already has a legal framework for personal-data protection through Ley No. 8968, Protección de la Persona frente al Tratamiento de sus Datos Personales, alongside institutional information-security and cybersecurity arrangements.
Greater interoperability does not weaken the need for those protections. It strengthens it.
A fragmented system has obvious disadvantages, but a highly connected system creates its own risks if access is excessive. The goal should not be to make every record visible to every participant. It should be to make relevant information available to the right actor for the right purpose.
This requires privacy by design rather than privacy being added after systems are built.
Role-based access, authentication, audit trails, secure information exchange and clear retention arrangements are technical controls. Equally important are human controls: workers understanding confidentiality, organizations knowing how to respond to inappropriate access and people receiving intelligible information about how their data are being used.
Long-term care also raises questions about consent and decision-making. Some people will require accessible communication or support to understand digital information-sharing choices. Cognitive impairment should not become a reason either to abandon privacy or automatically exclude somebody from decisions about their information.
Cybersecurity is continuity-of-care infrastructure
Cybersecurity in long-term care is sometimes framed primarily as an information-governance issue. It is also a service-continuity issue.
If digital systems increasingly hold care plans, workforce schedules, contact information, assessments and escalation arrangements, loss of access can affect real-world support. A cyber incident or prolonged system outage may mean workers cannot retrieve current instructions, organizations cannot identify scheduled visits or families cannot reach the route they normally use to request help.
The consequences become more significant as dependence on digital infrastructure increases.
Costa Rica's national digital-health strategy appropriately places cybersecurity alongside interoperability, governance and digital literacy. The same principle should apply as SINCA's digital ecosystem develops.
Care organizations need to know what happens when technology is unavailable. Essential information should remain recoverable. Workers should understand fallback procedures. Contact and escalation arrangements need to survive the failure of the primary platform.
This creates an important governance principle: digital maturity includes the ability to operate safely during digital failure.
The stronger system therefore combines cybersecurity with business continuity rather than treating the two as separate technical disciplines.
Operational scenario: the digital system goes offline during a working day
A community organization coordinates home support for dozens of older people across several districts. Worker schedules, contact information and current care instructions are held digitally. On a Monday morning, staff discover that the system cannot be accessed.
The immediate risk is not the missing technology itself. It is uncertainty about who requires support that day and which visits are most time-critical.
A resilient service has already identified its essential information and established fallback arrangements. Workers can access a controlled minimum dataset, managers know how to contact staff and families, and high-risk visits can be prioritized while the technical incident is investigated.
After recovery, the event becomes more than an IT ticket. Governance review examines whether any visits were missed, whether workers used outdated information, how quickly essential functions were restored and whether contingency arrangements were proportionate.
If similar incidents recur across organizations, SINCA and relevant institutional partners may need to consider whether common expectations for digital continuity are required as part of wider service-quality arrangements.
The scenario illustrates why digital transformation cannot be measured solely through adoption. The more important question is whether technology makes the care system more resilient overall.
The workforce needs digital competence without becoming an IT workforce
Digital transformation changes care roles.
A caregiver may need to record information electronically, respond to alerts, participate in remote supervision or support somebody to connect with a healthcare professional. A coordinator may use data to identify missed support or changing dependency. Managers may need to interpret dashboards rather than relying entirely on retrospective reports.
These activities require competence, but care workers should not be expected to compensate indefinitely for poorly designed systems.
Good technology reduces unnecessary administration. Poor technology can add duplicate data entry, fragmented passwords, repeated documentation and alert fatigue.
The workforce question is therefore not simply whether staff have been trained to use a platform. It is whether the digital workflow supports the work they are actually trying to perform.
Costa Rica's developing professionalization of the care workforce provides an opportunity to incorporate proportionate digital competence into training and continuing development. This might include secure documentation, basic data protection, remote communication, escalation of technology-generated alerts and understanding the limits of digital tools.
At the same time, organizations need to examine the workforce capability and skill mix required to manage increasingly digital services. Some functions will require specialist informatics, cybersecurity or data expertise rather than simply adding responsibility to frontline caregivers.
Data can turn individual care experience into system intelligence
One of digitalization's greatest potential benefits is the ability to see patterns that are difficult to identify through individual cases.
A single missed home-care visit is an operational problem. Repeated missed visits in one territory may indicate workforce capacity failure. A single delayed discharge may be unusual. A recurring pattern of people waiting for community support after hospital treatment may reveal a pathway problem. One caregiver ending an arrangement may be personal; persistent turnover may indicate unsustainable employment conditions.
Digital systems can make these patterns visible, but only if data are designed around meaningful questions.
SINCA's development creates the possibility of progressively linking population need, dependency, service availability and outcomes at a system level. This could support decisions about where capacity needs to expand and which forms of support are most effective.
The Quality Dashboard Builder offers organizations a way to structure indicators and performance information. It does not define Costa Rican national measures, but its underlying principle is relevant: information becomes useful when leaders can connect activity, quality, workforce and outcomes rather than viewing each dataset separately.
This also requires strong data governance and information accountability. Someone must be responsible for data definitions, quality, interpretation and action. Otherwise, digitalization can produce larger quantities of information without increasing institutional understanding.
Operational scenario: the dashboard reveals a problem that individual cases concealed
A SINCA-related service network sees no major incident trend. Individual organizations report generally stable activity, and most scheduled support is being delivered.
When data are examined territorially, however, one area shows a different pattern. Home-support start dates are becoming progressively later after assessment. Families are making more follow-up contacts while waiting, and hospital teams report difficulty arranging support for some people ready to return home.
No single case looked serious enough to trigger system escalation. Together, the cases reveal a capacity problem.
The response should not begin with blaming the local organizations. Governance first needs to understand the mechanism. Is the number of people requiring care rising? Are workers leaving? Is travel time reducing usable capacity? Is an administrative stage delaying service starts? Is funding available but workers unavailable?
Digital information allows the system to ask those questions earlier.
The resulting intervention might involve workforce development, different scheduling, additional service capacity or redesign of the referral process. The important point is that the information closes the loop: data identify a pattern, decision-makers investigate it, action follows and subsequent data show whether the change worked.
This is the difference between digital reporting and digital intelligence.
Artificial intelligence should follow the care problem, not lead it
As Costa Rica's health and care data mature, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics will inevitably become part of future discussions.
The Política Nacional de Salud already envisages greater use of data and predictive models within health-sector transformation. In long-term care, plausible future applications could include identifying patterns of increasing dependency, forecasting workforce demand, supporting scheduling or highlighting people whose circumstances may warrant review.
These possibilities should be approached proportionately.
AI should not be described as an established national long-term-care model in Costa Rica. Nor should predictive tools independently determine who receives care. Dependency, autonomy, family circumstances and personal preferences require human judgment and transparent processes.
The stronger use of analytics is decision support.
A model might identify a territory where demand is likely to rise faster than workforce supply. It could help planners test alternative capacity assumptions. It might highlight a cluster of repeated service interruptions that warrants investigation.
Organizations exploring this type of future planning can use the Digital Twin Scenario Modeler to examine how different workforce, capacity and service assumptions interact. It is a planning framework rather than a prediction of Costa Rican policy or individual need.
The governance requirement should grow with the significance of the decision. The more consequential an automated recommendation becomes, the stronger the need for transparency, validation, human review and routes to challenge errors.
Technology should strengthen autonomy rather than surveillance
Long-term-care technology enters people's homes and everyday lives in ways that many conventional health technologies do not.
A digital care record may contain details of intimate routines. Monitoring technology can reveal movement or inactivity. Location-enabled devices can provide reassurance while also creating surveillance. Family members may request access to information that the person themselves would prefer to keep private.
The central question is therefore not only whether technology can reduce risk. It is whose objectives the technology serves.
A person-centered digital model asks whether the individual understands the technology, agrees with its use where consent is applicable, can influence how it operates and receives a meaningful benefit from it.
For people with disabilities, this connects directly with autonomy and supported decision-making. For older people experiencing cognitive impairment, it requires careful balancing of safety, privacy and the person's remaining ability to express preferences.
This is why rights, consent and decision-making belong inside digital governance rather than being considered only after a technology has been selected.
Article 27 in this series examines assistive technology in greater depth. At the system level, however, the principle is already clear: technology should expand people's control over their lives wherever possible, not simply expand institutional visibility over them.
Funding decisions need to account for the whole digital lifecycle
Digital projects can appear attractive because technology promises scale. Once a platform exists, adding users may seem cheaper than expanding a labor-intensive service.
Long-term-care economics are rarely that simple.
Digital infrastructure requires implementation, connectivity, devices, cybersecurity, maintenance, support, training, upgrades and governance. Systems need integration. Workers need time to adapt. People unable to use the technology independently may need additional assistance.
The cost question should therefore extend beyond procurement.
Decision-makers need to understand whether technology reduces duplicated work, avoids unnecessary travel, improves continuity or helps scarce specialist capacity reach more people. They should also identify costs shifted elsewhere. A platform that saves administrative time but requires families to spend hours navigating it has not eliminated work; it has redistributed it.
Similarly, technology that identifies deterioration without funding a service capable of responding may improve information without improving outcomes.
The strongest digital business case therefore connects investment to service design. Technology should solve a defined operational problem and the surrounding system should have capacity to act on the information produced.
Governance must connect digital strategy with care strategy
Costa Rica has already recognized that digital-health transformation requires national governance rather than isolated technology projects. The same discipline will become increasingly important for long-term care.
SINCA brings together responsibilities that cross institutional boundaries. Digital development within that environment will require clarity about who sets standards, who controls particular datasets, who funds infrastructure, who responds to failures and how local experience influences national design.
Governance also needs to prevent duplication. If multiple institutions build separate assessment, workforce, referral or reporting systems without sufficient coordination, digitalization can harden fragmentation rather than remove it.
Organizations examining similar cross-system questions can use the Governance Maturity Assessment to structure consideration of accountability, assurance and decision rights. In Costa Rica, the precise institutional arrangements must remain grounded in SINCA, the Ministry of Health, CCSS, IMAS and other participating bodies rather than imported governance models.
The practical governance test is straightforward: when a digital problem affects somebody's care, is it clear who is responsible for fixing the problem rather than merely maintaining the technology?
From connected records to connected support
The next stage of Costa Rica's digital-care development should not be judged by the number of platforms it creates.
The more meaningful test is whether people experience fewer gaps between services.
A connected system would increasingly enable relevant information to accompany transitions, make changing dependency visible, help households find qualified support, give planners better intelligence about capacity and allow recurring problems to be recognized earlier.
That does not require one enormous database containing every aspect of a person's life. In many circumstances, federated or interoperable systems with clear purposes and access controls may be more appropriate.
The architecture should follow the care model.
If Costa Rica wants long-term care to become more home-based, preventive and integrated, digital infrastructure should help workers operate across those boundaries. If the objective is greater autonomy, technology should give people more control rather than merely increasing monitoring. If territorial equity matters, digital investment should extend reach without excluding households with weak connectivity or digital skills.
The country's existing health infrastructure gives it a stronger foundation than a care system starting without national digital experience. The challenge is now to translate that capability into the distinct environment of long-term care without assuming that healthcare technology and care technology are interchangeable.
International learning: digitize relationships, not fragmentation
Costa Rica's emerging experience offers a wider lesson for countries developing long-term-care systems alongside more mature digital-health infrastructure.
The temptation is to begin with technology: choose a platform, create a portal, connect databases and then redesign practice around the resulting system. A more sustainable approach begins with the relationships that need to work.
Who needs to know that somebody's functional ability has deteriorated? Who confirms that a referral resulted in support? How does a hospital know that home arrangements are ready? How does a family identify a qualified caregiver? How does a national system recognize that one territory repeatedly lacks capacity?
Once those questions are clear, digital infrastructure can make the relationships faster and more reliable.
Costa Rica's institutional arrangements are specific to its CCSS, Ministry of Health, SINCA and wider social-protection architecture. Other countries cannot reproduce those structures directly. The transferable principle is that interoperability should be designed around continuity rather than connectivity for its own sake.
A digital system becomes valuable when it reduces the number of times a person has to reconstruct their story, makes responsibility clearer and converts frontline information into better decisions without compromising privacy or autonomy.
Conclusion
Costa Rica enters the digital phase of long-term-care development with important advantages. EDUS has created substantial national experience in digital health, the country's 2023–2030 digital-health roadmap places governance, interoperability, literacy and cybersecurity at the center of transformation, and SINCA is creating new information requirements around dependency, services and workforce capacity. Cuidar.cr already demonstrates how digital infrastructure can address a practical care-system problem by making trained caregivers more visible to households.
The strategic opportunity now is to connect these developments without confusing connection with centralization. Long-term care requires information that clinical systems alone do not capture: functioning, daily support, caregiver sustainability, personal preferences, continuity and participation. Better interoperability can bridge health and care, but only when information exchange has a defined purpose, appropriate permissions and a service capable of responding.
Implementation will determine whether digitalization reduces fragmentation or merely reproduces it electronically. Costa Rica will need accessible alternatives for people facing digital exclusion, stronger digital competence across the workforce, resilient cybersecurity and continuity arrangements, and governance capable of turning data into learning while protecting privacy and autonomy.
The strongest future is therefore not one in which technology replaces relationships. It is one in which technology makes those relationships more dependable: the right information reaching the right person, responsibility remaining visible and people experiencing long-term care as a more connected part of their lives rather than a collection of disconnected systems.