Introduction
DISEASE, SECONDARY
Against the background that older people often have chronic, mostly multiple illnesses and these are accompanied by physical, mental, and functional limitations, a new local, collaborative, stepped, and personalized form of care, the LoChro-Care intervention, was developed and evaluated [The objective of the present study is to outline the effectiveness of LoChro-Care regarding the secondary endpoint of health resource utilization. Specifically, we hypothesized that LoChro-Care would lead to a more appropriate utilization of health and nursing care services in terms of decreased emergency hospitalizations, reduced non-elective hospital days and nursing home admissions, more adequate use of informal and formal community services, as well as enhanced disease self-management abilities that contribute to save health care costs [