Coordinating patient care across multiple healthcare professionals: Essential factors and challenges

Care coordination has been the subject of several laws on coordinated care pathways and healthcare system modernization to make care paths more fluid, simplify, and consolidate support systems for coordinating complex pathways. However, patients and professionals continue to experience deteriorating systems and slow changes. In this context, our research studies the effective modalities of multi-professional coordination of patient care pathways in France. To this end, we conducted 51 interviews with professionals, structures, patients, and caregivers. To analyze the data, we drew on the literature to distinguish between organizational, functional, and personalized coordination regarding intra- and inter-organizational dimensions. The results of our study provide a better understanding of the contributions and limitations of the new coordination systems, as well as the challenges still to be met.