Infrastructures for Health Care – Connecting practices across institutional and professional boundaries
Second International Workshop
18-19 June 2009
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
The first international workshop: Infrastructures for Health Care was held at the Technical University of Denmark in June 2006. It attracted researchers, health care professionals, IT professionals, administrators, and others engaged in the development of infrastructures and new, integrated applications and services for improving the quality of health care services.
The purpose of this second international workshop is to continue this forum for discussing current issues and trends related to the integration and coordination of health care practices across institutional, organizational, and professional boundaries.
The health care sector is characterized by a worsening shortage of personnel and endlessly growing costs caused by the development of new treatments in combination with rising demands for treatment, which are associated with an aging population and an increase in chronic diseases. Against this backdrop, policy makers, health care professionals and researchers show an increased interest in innovative systems of care, which improve communication, coordination and collaboration among patients/citizens, care providers in primary care and specialty services (clinics, hospitals, emergency departments, old people’s homes etc.).
Concepts like shared care, integrated care and continuity of care are indicative of ambitions of creating coherent and effective health care services for patients that require complex – and often long-term – care. Although these concepts are often used in relation to projects that seek to enhance communication, coordination, and collaboration around particular patient groups, they also have bearing on more general visions of reorganizing health care.
Infrastructural arrangements – such as electronic patient records, classification schemes, accounting systems, communication standards, and quality systems – play a crucial role in these new models of care, and it is increasingly hard to imagine integrative initiatives that do not have a strong IT component. This raises a multitude of questions about the – actual and imagined – role and impact of IT and other infrastructure components in the development of patient-oriented, integrated healthcare services.
We wish to highlight how new infrastructures – socio-technical assemblages – simultaneously connect existing practices, influence and change these practices, and create entirely new practices in health care work (e.g. related to the maintenance of the infrastructure itself). What characterizes infrastructures in health care? What role do they play in transforming and reorganizing health care and in creating new actors in health care? How are infrastructures established and maintained? What is the impact on work practices, organizational structures, cost effectiveness, quality of care, etc.?