Patient relation management: a relevant solution to connect the links of a healthcare chain

The USIT-tool is used to investigate the health care chain of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) in a Dutch region. The advantage of the USIT-tool is that is results in insight in the relevant problems, solutions and constraints of the caregivers both in the organisational and the information technological area. The main problem in the MS-health care chain proved to be the lack of co-ordination and the inefficient communication between caregivers. Although most caregivers were convinced of the need to improve delivered care for MS-patient, most of them also expressed that they would spend little time and energy on improving MS-care, because of the low relevance of MS-care compared to other kinds of care. To improve care, taking in account this constraint we propose to build a Patient Relation Management (PRM) System. A PRM is a simple web-based application that is based on agreement by the caregivers about the route an MS-patient should follow through health care. PRM supports routing, tracking and tracing of a patient and supplies the caregivers with professional guidelines. The PRM-concept can easily be expanded to other patient groups or diseases and can serve as a first step to a regional Electronic Patient Record. It is likely that we would have suggested a far more complicated ICT solution if we had only analysed the MS-care process as such, without specific consideration of the USIT dimensions. The USIT analysis helped us to balance the breadth of the proposed solution with the nature of the situation the future users of the system are in.