Recruiting organisation: Department of Public and Occupational Health at the Amsterdam University Medical Center, the Netherlands
Supervisors: Prof. Martine de Bruijne; dr. Marijke Melles, Marit B. Hagland
Doctoral Candidate: Carla Molenaar
Secondments: Caresharing (now ZorgDomein) in the Netherlands (3 months); Valide AS in Norway (3 months)
Summary
The project acronym is DigiTeams standing for Digital Technology to Engage and Assist Multidisciplinary teams. The project evolves around the need for, promotion, adoption and implementation of a digital collaborations platform (DCP) for network care collaboration. During this project we focus our research on a specific health care application aimed at interconnecting different Electronic Patient Records (EPR) from different health care providers, rather than requesting healthcare providers to change the EPR software they use.
The goals of the project will be achieved through: (1) Investigating the needs, values, facilitators and barriers of stakeholders involved in transmural elderly care; (2) Explore specific contextual challenges for transmural team functioning and identify specific design opportunities using human centered design research techniques (i.e. a sociotechnical system perspective including stakeholder mapping, context mapping and data flow mapping); (3) investigate transdisciplinary responsibilities and collaborations in the conceptualization, dissemination and scale-up of the DCP ;(4) identify and understand cross-national differences in contextual challenges and use of transmural support tools for transmural care teams; and (5) Evaluate the impact of a tailored integration information platform to support transmural care teams.
This project aims to integrate insights drawn from healthcare professionals, patients, caregivers and corporate stakeholders with implementation and stakeholder theories, to answer these above-mentioned questions so that the lessons learned from this care network can highlight important aspects for consideration in human centered design and implementation strategies of DCP’s.
Background
Care for chronic patients, for instance vulnerable elderly patients, diabetes patients or orthopaedic patients, is provided by multiple care teams working for different care organisations, e.g. hospitals, general practice and long-term community care services. Each of these care domains not only has its own organisational structure, but also its own information infrastructure. This makes it hard to communicate information to obtain a complete picture of the patient situation when care needs to be provided by displaced teams. A specific health care application was developed aimed at interconnecting different Electronic Patient Records (EPR) from different health care providers, rather than requesting healthcare providers to change the EPR software they use.
In the The Netherlands this digital communication platform (DCP) is currently implemented to support transmural teamwork. The purpose of this project is to investigate how a digital network communication platform supports transmural care provided by care teams, consisting of professionals in primary and secondary care, the patient and his/her informal care givers. The project also focuses on the transdisciplinary collaboration practices that are deployed to overcome barriers and create facilitators during the dissemination and scale-up of digital innovations in health care.
Approach
To achieve the goals of this project we will: (1) Investigate the needs, values, facilitators and barriers of stakeholders involved; (2) Explore specific contextual challenges for transmural team functioning and identify specific design opportunities using human-centered design research techniques (i.e. a sociotechnical system perspective including stakeholder mapping, context mapping and patient journey mapping); (3) investigate transdisciplinary responsibilities and collaborations in the conceptualization, dissemination and scale-up of the DCP; (4) Identify and understand cross-national differences in contextual challenges and use of transmural support tools for transmural care teams; and (5) Evaluate the impact of a tailored integration information platform to support transmural care teams.
The studies will result in a review of contextual challenges and information needs of transmural care teams, a roadmap for the dissemination and scale-up of platforms to support transmural care teams and guidance for end-users and policy makers.
Our research team
The Doctoral Candidate is part of the Department of Public and Occupational Health at the Amsterdam University Medical Center and will collaborate closely with the Department of Human-Centered Design of the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Technical University of Delft.
The network allows the various PhD candidates in a variety of European countries to meet and to learn with and from each other and the collective group of PhD supervisors. The consortium brings together the leading researchers on team processes in their various forms and applications. The network activities will support the mutual exchange of candidates and supervisors in unique ways, such as spring and winter schools and network wide meetings with both academic and non-academic partners.