Achieving Holistic Health for the Individual through Person-Centered Collaborative Care Supported by Informatics

This article seeks to describe the current state of informatics supported collaborative care and to point out areas of future research in this highly interdisciplinary field.

In this article, person-centered collaborative care is seen as a concept addressing both the provision of care over organizational borders between health and social care, and within care teams as well as the changed patient/client-care provider relationship characterized by increased patient/client involvement.

From a health systems perspective, there are several attempts to describe the conceptual and theoretical basis for collaborative care indicating that agreement on core concepts and terminology is difficult. From an informatics perspective, focus is on standardization of clinical content models and terminology to achieve interoperability of information technology systems and to support standardized care pathways. Few examples look into how ad-hoc collaborative care processes can be supported using information technology and informatics standards. Nevertheless, promising examples do exist showing that integrational Information Communication Technology services can be supportive for collaborative care developments. However, the current landscape consists of many fragmented, often technology-driven eHealth solutions targeting specific diagnostic groups in geographically and/or organizationally restricted settings.

A systematic approach incorporating organizational, clinical, informatics and social science knowledge is needed to perform further research in areas such as virtual team partnerships, new paradigms of care delivery, data and knowledge management as well as its secure sharing. Also organizational and legal aspects need to be further researched in order to facilitate the coordinated provision of health and social care to citizens including self-management, utilizing informatics support in a societal context.