IT-Enabled Healthcare Coordination Minitrack

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10125/42482

Healthcare coordination involves organizing and sharing information among all participants involved in patient care in order to provide safer and more effective care. It has been identified as a key strategy to improve effectiveness, safety, and efficiency of healthcare. While the need for healthcare coordination is clear, there are many obstacles, both technical and organizational.

Information technology has played a role in enhancing productivity through coordination in many industries, including manufacturing. However, nowhere is this role more critical than in healthcare, where IT has the potential to improve patient health and, in many cases, save lives, through improved coordination between various parties such as hospitals, providers, and patients. However, use of IT in healthcare presents some unique challenges and issues. This minitrack will focus on the use of emerging information technologies to address these challenges to achieve and enable efficient coordination in healthcare.

We invite papers that focus on, but are not limited to:

Challenges and opportunities associated with sharing electronic health information among multiple stakeholders
Impact of privacy and security concerns on coordination
Policy and compliance to facilitate health coordination
Patient and caregivers participation in coordination of health
Payers and other stakeholders’ (pharma, device manufacturers etc.,) role in supporting coordination of health
Integrating medical devices with Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems
Integrating patient engagement and self management tools
Information technology to support patient centered medical homes, accountable care organizations, and bundled payments
Organizational change management for care coordination
Care coordination and patient/population health
Impact of IT-enabled care coordination on health outcomes (e.g. hospital readmissions, cost efficiency)
Technology to support communication and care coordination
Technology to measure effective care coordination
Coordinating care for underserved populations
Tele-health solutions to promote care coordination
Role of analytics in achieving care coordination
Coordination of healthcare administrative processes, including external agencies

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Susan Sherer (Primary Contact)
Lehigh University
Email: sas6@lehigh.edu

Vishal Ahuja
Southern Methodist University Dallas
Email: vahuja@smu.edu

Rajiv Kohli
College of William & Mary
Email: rajiv.kohli@mason.wm.edu

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Towards Designing an Assistant for Semi-Automatic EMS Dispatching
(2017-01-04) Reuter-Oppermann, Melanie; Morana, Stefan; Hottum, Peter
Many Emergency Medical Service (EMS) systems worldwide handle emergency rescues as well as patient transports and dispatchers need to assign ambulances to incidents manually throughout the day. The management of the complex system together with the manual assignments can easily create stress for and pressure on the dispatchers. Mathematical algorithms can help improving the dispatching quality, but then dispatchers still need to choose the best-fitting algorithm and furthermore, trust the algorithm’s dispatching suggestion. We propose an assistant that can support the EMS dispatchers. The assistant offers explanations for the choice of the algorithm as well as the dispatching suggestion in order to increase the dispatchers’ trust and decrease their stress. We ground the assistant’s design in Information Systems as well as Operations Research literature and thus, show how interdisciplinary service research can contribute in designing artefacts for complex service systems to solve real-world problems.
The Transformative Role of Telemedicine on Coordination: A Practice Approach
(2017-01-04) Meyer, Julien; Pare, Guy
Delivering coordinated care at a distance challenges work practices and interprofessional collaboration. Using a case study methodology, we analyzed how three occupational groups, pathologists, technologists, and surgeons, coordinate work during the deployment of a major telepathology network in Eastern Canada. The aim of this study is to determine the extent to which and how telemedicine modifies coordination practices. \ \ Transformations emerged from our in-depth case analysis around three aspects of coordination: predictability, common understanding and accountability. First, predictability relied on routines in traditional settings, but shifted to a reliance on plans and rules in a telemedicine setting. Second, common understanding of the task shifted from relying on familiarity between stakeholders to an emphasis on standards. Third, accountability became less collective and more individual and contractual in a telemedicine setting, resulting in more marked boundaries between professional groups. Finally, proximity remained a determinant of accountability in telemedicine contexts, regardless of organizational arrangements. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Challenges to Aligning Coordination Technology with Organizations, People, and Processes in Healthcare
(2017-01-04) Sherer, Susan; Meyerhoefer, Chad; Levick, Donald
Healthcare coordination has proven difficult to achieve, even with new coordination technologies such as shared electronic health records. Successful coordination requires alignment of information technology with new organizational structures, reskilled personnel, and reengineering of work processes. We suggest that this is more challenging in the healthcare industry as a result of the need for integrating information across care cycles, payment and regulatory mechanisms, high degree of professional control, failure impact and privacy concerns, and information granularity across the care cycle. We illustrate these challenges with several examples from a qualitative study of the integration of electronic health records between hospital and ambulatory practices. \
Building Healthier Communities: Value Co-Creation within the Chronic Care Model for Rural Under-Resourced Areas
(2017-01-04) Higa, Christina; Davidson, Elizabeth
Chronic disease is a worldwide epidemic that disproportionately affects low- to middle-income countries and regions [1]. The Chronic Care Model (CCM) is intended to address the significant societal costs and health burdens of chronic disease through redesign of the health care system and has raised awareness of the need for integration of clinical services and public health resources. To complement this descriptive, a-theoretical framework, we develop a theory-driven research model rooted in service-dominant logic (S-D logic). Our model conceptualizes improved chronic disease health outcomes as co-created value and focuses on triadic actor-to-actor-to actor (patients, family/friends and health care providers) resource integration and service exchange. We illustrate the model’s utility for policy and intervention design and for research on diabetes self-management programs in low-income, rural communities, in which patients’ social capital resources can be integrated with health IT and healthcare expertise in CCM program design. \
Bring Your Own Mobile Device (BYOD) to the Hospital: Layered Boundary Barriers and Divergent Boundary Management Strategies
(2017-01-04) Stephens, Keri; Zhu, Yaguang; Harrison, Millie; Iyer, Meena; Hairston, Terrie; Luk, John
This study examined how one US hospital implemented a mobile communication app to improve workplace communication. The hospital did not provide the technology, instead they asked their workers to use their own personal mobiles at work, through a permissive bring your own device to work (BYOD) policy. Using boundary theory, we conducted a constant-comparative analysis to examine the layers of boundary management issues. At the organizational level, the key issues were policy legacy, communicating the policy, control, dead zones, and mobile costs. At the group level, different hospital units created their own formal and informal policies. At the individual level, themes included personal mobile device use, job role expectations, and decision-making autonomy. The discussion presents examples of how healthcare workers enacted segregator and integrator boundaries. Our findings explain why it is not easy to tell hospital employees, “Go ahead and use your mobiles for patient care,” and have them embrace this practice.
Introduction to IT-Enabled Healthcare Coordination Minitrack
(2017-01-04) Sherer, Susan; Ahuja, Vishal; Kohli, Rajiv

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