Understanding Patient Pathways in the Context of Integrated Health Care Services - Implications from a Scoping Review

Healthcare systems in western countries are continuously working to achieve efficient resource allocation and to improve access to quality medical care. The implementation of standardised care processes promises better integration and coordination of care across several healthcare providers. In this context, an increasing use of the term patient pathway is recognised within official documents provided by health authorities and within scientific publications in recent years. However, a common understanding, distinguishing the term from other pathway approaches such as care- or clinical pathways, is missing. By means of a scoping review we analysed 132 publications in order to clarify key concepts and the understanding of patient pathways. Six common themes in the literature were identified and results show that individualisatio nand care continuity are essential descriptive characteristics. Using this motivation, we discuss the main implications for research and practice by the example of comprehensive cancer care in the European Union

“Look Closer” Anthropomorphic Design and Perception of Anthropomorphism in Conversational Agent Research

Conversation agents have been attracting increased attention in IS research and increased adoption in practice. They provide an AI-driven conversation-like interface and tap into the anthropomorphism bias of its users. There has been extensive research on improving this effect for over a decade since increased anthropomorphism leads to increased service satisfaction, trust, and other effects on the user. This work examines the current state of research regarding anthropomorphism and anthropomorphic design to guide future research. It utilizes a modified structured literature analysis to extract and classify the examined constructs and their relationships in the hypotheses of current literature. We provide an overview of current research, highlighting focus areas. Based on our results, we formulate several open research questions and provide the IS community with directions for future research

Patient Pathways for Comprehensive Care Networks - A Development Method and Lessons from its Application in Oncology Care

Patient pathways are recognized as a valuable tool to support standardization, comparability, quality, and transparency of care processes in comprehensive care networks. Still, existing development approaches lack real practical guidance as well as an integration of the network and patient perspectives. Therefore, a user-centered and requirements-based approach was chosen to design a patient pathway development method. It defines a role model and procedural steps. The method’s innovative character lies in the development of generic patient pathway templates to be adapted to national, regional, and local conditions of specific comprehensive care networks. The method was positively assessed in terms of demonstrating its applicability and the fulfilment of user requirements with a use case from oncology care – the development of a colorectal cancer patient pathway template. This work drives the standardization of patient pathway development and their large-scale implementation in comprehensive care networks, supporting the analysis, design, and optimization of healthcare processes

Towards Model-based Integration of Management Systems

With the shift towards sustainable business development, many companies implement function-specific management systems, which can be certified against the corresponding management system standards. The management of the different systems, in particular the management of their documentation, is a very time consuming and costly process. In this context, the paper addresses the issue of the integration of management systems. Based on a exemplary comparison of the common management system standards in the areas of quality management (ISO 9001), environmental management (ISO 14001), energy management (ISO 50001), and work safety management (OHSAS 18001), characteristic requirement patterns (hereafter referred to as integration types) are identified. With the help of these characteristics, design proposals for method fragments for the construction of a method for model- based integration of MS are presented. The patterns are demonstrated by extending an existing method for model-based energy management

PERSONALISATION AND DYNAMISATION OF CARE PATHWAYS – FOUNDATIONS AND CONCEPTUAL CONSIDERATIONS

The transition of western health care systems can be facilitated by Integrated Care (IC) approaches helping to diminish demographic challenges. The concept of clinical pathways is an approach for a more structured, overarching and broader care as it allows higher system efficiency, i.e. a better coordination of treatment especially for patients with complex diseases (co-morbidities). They can be sustained by Information and Communication Technology (ICT) that enables a better coordination and integration of patients within their care and social network. However, there is no broad use of such pathways as it lacks of a concept for the utilisation of a holistic pathway usage for the care of people with co-morbidities. The paper contributes by developing a framework for the design, handling and work of or with personalised dynamic pathways (PDPs). By suggesting the PDP-Framework, we aim at providing a concept that has the potential to improve the care. It also fosters the application of ICT-based care in terms of a concept for shaping ICT services. Our contribution builds the fundament for a multi-actor involvement along the care processes and facilitates the monitoring of the patients’ statuses, their activities and compliance with care measures

The Challenge of Energy Management – Status-Quo and Perspectives for Reference Models

Energy management is one of the great challenges of the industry in the next years. Energy becomes more and more to a critical resource. Until now, enterprises need to implement energy management system with nearly no guidance. In the following paper we present the foundation of a reference model-based method that serves for setting up energy management systems in various industrial sectors. The goal is to support reduction emission and cost reduction as well as certification needs. In contrast to previous approaches, this approach enables a model-based certification and allows an automation of activities of the process of supervision of the consumption of energy and the appropriate reengineering of business processes

Peer Buddy or Expert? – On the Avatar Design of a Virtual Coach for Obesity Patients

Morbid obesity in association with comorbidities is a considerable burden for the healthcare systems worldwide. Long-term weight loss maintenance requires sustainable behavioral changes but poor adherence is a significant problem in obesity care today and patients often relapse. Prior research has found conversational agents with of a humanoid representation (avatar) embodying the role of a virtual coach useful for the interface of health behavior change support systems. Regarding the avatar design, the coach could, e.g., take the role of an obese “peer buddy” or a lean “expert”. Based on requirements and design principles derived from the literature, the present study investigates how the avatar should be designed. Therefore, two patient surveys were conducted to evaluate static and dynamic representations of potential coaches. The results suggest that patients welcome the concept and lean “expert” coaches might be more suitable in an obesity context. Design implications for future research are derived and discussed

Model-Supported Business Alignment of IT — Conceptual Foundations

Business Information Technology (IT) alignment focuses on the efficient support of business processes by IT. Therefore,existing software artifacts are addressed by business process models. When the processes change, however, there is a need toadjust the supporting software systems. Thus, already during the design phase of business process models, IT artifacts shouldto be considered. The instrument of conceptual modeling gains wide acceptance, especially in the health care sector todescribe and manage clinical processes, such as Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) and Clinical Pathways (CP). There are noholistic approaches so far that provide the alignment between these two concepts and ensure the quality of treatment and theconsistent adaptation of a Hospital Information System (HIS), in particular the hospital’s Workflow Management System(WfMS). To link business process models and the WfMS, the Description Kit Approach (DKA) is used to prepare conceptualmodels to make them automatically analyzable. It is suggested that at an early stage of the modeling process the use ofguidelines has an substantial benefit for avoiding integration conflicts in conceptual models. Furthermore, due to the way theapproach bridges the semantic gap, changes of business requirements as well as technical implementation restrictionsinfluence each other. This results in an ongoing system development process that can be interpreted as a permanentmanagement of application systems. Our results contribute to model-based management theories that have so far neglectedthe distributed construction of conceptual models