Finding the royal way to stimulate and evaluate integrated care in Europe

© 2015, © The Author(s) 2015. Integrated care is the most promising concept to tackle the increasing threat of chronic diseases by redesigning care and changing patient lifestyle and care provider behaviour. However, the evidence about integrated care in the literature is inconclusive. This might be largely explained by flaws in the development, delivery, evaluation and implementation of integrated care thus far. Therefore, the research agenda for integrated care should focus on the adequate development, comprehensive evaluation and successful implementation of integrated care in order to support the collaboration of health authorities, payers, care providers and patient organisations towards integrating care. These issues are not explicitly addressed in the current HORIZON 2020 work programme. This letter provides a short list of topics for future research in integrated care to provide evidence about the (cost-)effectiveness of integrated care.