Toward an ecosystemic approach to chronic care design and practice in primary care

Despite the increasing prevalence of chronic conditions and multimorbidities, the essential attributes of the structure and delivery of primary care continue to be defined in terms of disease-specific approaches and acute conditions. Effective improvements will require alternative ways of thinking about chronic care design and practice. This essay argues for an ecosystemic understanding of chronic care founded on a communal and a dynamic view of the response of the patient, family, and health professionals to chronic illness. The communal view highlights the cocreative nature of the response to illness and the need to integrate the skills and resources of all the participants; what and how the participants learn in the course of the illness become central to chronic care. The dynamic view draws attention to the unfolding of illness management activities over time and to the need to engage the illness at specific time points or recurring time intervals that have the potential for important change in the experience of the participants. Chronic care would then include design for community, with an emphasis on the patient and family as necessary participants in the health care team. It would also include design for emergent learning and practice whereby health professionals go beyond standardization of care processes to develop new ways to harness the participants' imagination and learn from the changing experience of illness. Health professionals would also learn to cultivate trust, communal engagement, and openness to experimentation that facilitate collective learning, and help sharpen the participants' responsiveness to the emergent.