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landscape. The main theoretical contribution of the
paper is the introduction of the notion of process
conglomeration, which is used to capture the
emergent nature of health care provisioning in an
environment of independent care parties. The paper
also provides practical contributions through an
analysis of the challenges posed by process
conglomerations as well as solutions in the form of
information services.
The proposed information services are based on
the assumption that care activities offered by one
care provider can be structured according to the
patient care process, basically an action workflow
loop. The patient care process structures the internal
work of a care provider and its interactions with a
patient, thereby producing a large amount of
information. This constitutes the bulk of the
information needed by the proposed information
services. Thus, implementing the services does not
require extensive additional information
management for care providers that already use the
patient care process.
Our work has been carried out according to the
design science framework, which is also reflected by
the structure of the paper that follows the methods
proposed by Peffers et al. (2007). While this paper
focuses on problem analysis, requirements definition
and solution design, previous work has addressed
demonstration and evaluation of the services.
In future work, we will detail the contents of the
information services and integrate them into an
overarching systems and service architecture. We
will also continue our work on empirical validation
of this architecture.
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