Horizontal Affordances for Patient Centred Care in Hospitals

Abstract

While it is generally accepted that patient centred care should be the guiding principle for the delivery of health services, it is not yet clear how this should be digitalised. What is clear, however, is that the current IT solutions are not satisfactory. In this research, we suggest the affordance construct as an analytical lens to understand how technological artefacts and human agency can generate action possibilities to support horizontal process innovation by asking: (i) which affordances enable digitalisation of patient centred healthcare, and (ii) how can these identified affordances be leveraged to innovate patient centred digital hospitals. Our empirical evidence is a comparative study of two hospitals in Sweden and Norway. Our theoretical contribution is the identification of six horizontal affordances for patient centred care. The practical contribution is that horizontal affordances emerge through configurations of human actors and lightweight IT solutions, loosely coupled to heavy weight systems.