Workflow Management for Multiple Sclerosis Patients: IT and Organization

Abstract

Patients with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) visit various healthcare providers during the course of their disease. It was suggested that IT might help to\ud orchestrate their care provision. We have applied the USE IT-tool to get insight in the relevant problems, solutions and constraints of the MS-care and the MS care providers both in the organizational and the information technological area. There is hardly a chain of healthcare, but rather, a network in which informal communication plays an important role. This informal network worked reasonably effective, but inefficient and slow. The patient himself plays a keyrole in information exchange between care-providers. Many providers were unaware of the services that other healthcare providers could give in general or did provide to a specific patient. MS patients-count is only small for most care providers. None of the interviewed patients mentioned a lack of contacts between careproviders as a problem. They thought that lack of\ud experience caused their major problems: insufficient and inadequate care. To improve care, we proposed a solution that combines a “short MS-protocol”, the\ud introduction of a central coordinator of care and a Patient Relation Management (PRM) System. This is a simple web-based application that is based on agreement by the caregivers that supports routing, tracking and tracing of a MS patient and supplies the caregivers with professional guidelines, as written down in the protocol. It is likely that we would have suggested a far more complicated ICT solution if we had only analyzed the MS-care process as such, without specific consideration of the USE IT dimensions