2 de May de 2025

Together Better, the new digital tool designed to offer comprehensive and integrated care for the well-being of the citizens of Mataró

Science For Change has collaborated with Fundació Hospital Sant Jaume i Santa Magdalena de Mataró to create Together Better, a digital platform that connects citizens with healthcare professionals with the aim of offering holistic care and active listening to the needs of the population, guaranteeing their access to well-being and dignified care services.

The Together Better project is an initiative driven by the Fundació Hospital Sant Jaume i Santa Magdalena de Mataró with the purpose of creating a digital service that operates as a connection infrastructure between the different well-being providers and the population of Mataró.

With this tool, the aim is to create synergies that optimize the resources of the territory by establishing collaborative links to facilitate access to dignified care for both citizens and professionals. It’s a platform intended to act as a catalyst for cooperative projects and to allow citizen participation in defining the city’s well-being model, as well as managing their own well-being journey.

To create a tool that would bring the citizens closer to the well-being services of the city of Mataró, it was necessary to gather the ideas, motivations, and concerns of numerous people from various sectors (citizens, third sector, public sector, and private sector). Co-design methodologies have been key to achieving this objective, as they have allowed the participants to express themselves freely, create, and connect with each other. The participating individuals and entities found the initiative very useful and were very enthusiastic about contributing to this project for the transformation of the well-being model of their city. Furthermore, the very process of creating Together Better has been a unique opportunity for the participants to get to know each other, collaborate, and exchange their points of view.

Mireia Ros

Project Manager of the project and Specialist in Health and Social Studies at SFC.

During the project, Science For Change was responsible for the conceptualization of the platform through three phases that allowed for the collection of the necessary data to create a solution from scratch that responded to the objectives requested by the project.

During the first phase of the project, a social investigation of the health and well-being context of Mataró was carried out in order to establish the framework in which the solution should operate. This first phase confirmed the need to align the designed tool with the concept of social prescribing, taking into account the heterogeneity of the population of Mataró."
During the second phase, several co-design sessions were held with the different sectors of the quadruple helix to determine how the tool should be built in order to guarantee the challenges and needs presented by both the entities in the well-being sector and the citizens themselves. Firstly, co-creation sessions were held with the agents separately, followed by a joint session where all the functionalities, proposals, and ideas that emerged during the previous sessions were shared in order to combine them, reaching a satisfactory joint solution for all parties."
In the final phase, a low-fidelity prototype was built and tested through iterative prototyping sessions, resulting in two final high-fidelity prototypes of Together Better, one with access for citizens and the other with access for service providers."

The data collected during the phase of understanding the social context of Mataró, in terms of health and well-being, was crucial in identifying which needs had to be covered by the desired outcome of the project and in conceptualizing the co-design sessions so that citizens and well-being service providers could contribute their ideas, experiences, and perceptions with the aim of finding a solution capable of meeting the project's objectives. In this sense, from the second phase of the project onwards, our work has been to analyze and combine the information obtained during the participatory sessions to create an integrated service within a digital tool capable of providing satisfactory value for all profiles of potential users.

Òscar Larraga

Social and Cultural Anthropology Specialist at SFC.

A total of 20 working sessions based on participatory and co-design methodologies were carried out during the project. More than 35 people and entities were involved in these sessions, and more than 200 surveys were conducted among citizens and service providers.

The participation of citizens and entities from Mataró has been fundamental in enriching the project with diverse perspectives and ensuring that the needs of all stakeholders are reflected in the final product.