Benkt Wangler

The coordination hub: Toward patient-centered and collaborative care processes:

The organization and processes of today’s health and social care are becoming ever more complex as a consequence of societal trends, including an aging population and an increased reliance on care at home. One aspect of the increased complexity is that a single patient may receive care from several care providers, which easily results in situations with potentially incoherent, uncoordinated, and interfering care processes. In order to describe and analyze such situations, the article introduces the notion of a process conglomeration. This is defined as a set of patient-care processes that all concern the same patient, that are overlapping in time, and that all are sharing the overall goal of improving or maintaining the health and social well-being of the patient. Problems and challenges of process conglomerations are investigated using coordination theory and models for continuous process improvement. In order to address the challenges, a solution is proposed in the form of a Coordination Hub, being an integrated software service that offers a number of information services for coordinating the activities of the processes in a process conglomeration.

Understanding Care Work and the Coordination of Care Process Conglomerations

Health and social care is becoming ever more complex as a consequence of societal trends, including an aging population and increased reliance on care at home. One aspect of the increased complexity is that a single patient may receive care from several care providers, which easily results in situations with potentially incoherent, uncoordinated, and interfering care processes. In order to describe and analyze such situations, the article introduces the notions of patient-centered care process and a conglomeration of such. The latter is defined as a set of patient care processes that all concern the same patient, are overlapping in time, and are all sharing the overall goal of improving or maintaining the health and social well-being of the patient. The processes are based on a PDCA-cycle comprising phases for assessing, planning, performing and following up the care for the patient independently of health and social care organizations.

The TEMPORA Approach: Information Systems Development Based on Explicit Business Rules with Time

This paper provides an account of the project TEMPORA, run from 1989 to 1994 and sponsored by the European Union, in which the Swedish Institute for Systems Development (SISU) and the research institute SINTEF from Norway were two of the partners. The project aimed at developing a prototypical systems development environment that involved the time dimension and it was based on the explicit representation of business rules. The Nordic partners played important roles in the project, in designing, building, and evaluating modeling formalisms and tools, as well as in designing methodological support.