Coupling documentation and communication practices to support integrated care pathways

Abstract

Creating an overview of a patient’s situation is essential for medical work, particularly for care actors participating in integrated care pathways. While we notice the failure of national initiatives to create systems to support care actors’ practices, our research focuses on investigating the actual practices held by care actors to build these overviews. Our study shows that care actors document their patients’ cases and communicate about them. We, therefore, imply that systems supporting integrated care pathways should couple documents and discussions and permit their visualization according to three dimensions: the problems that occur, the source of information (the care actor), and the time.