Special Issue of International Journal of Medical Informatics on Supporting Collaboration in Healthcare Settings

摘要

Healthcare is among the most complex and highly collaborative domains of work in the world. For instance, with the increasing complexity and specialization of medical care in settings such as hospitals, individual care has given way to multidisciplinary patient-care processes. The National Institute of Medicine in its landmark Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century states that patient care teams will become central to the delivery of high-quality medical care. Clearly, collaboration is a central component to effective patient care teams as well as central aspect of the healthcare delivery. With the focus on patient-centered care, collaboration also plays an essential role in informal care settings such as the patient's home. For these reasons, it has become critically important that health information technologies are understood, designed, built, and deployed with this collaboration in mind.