Designing Integrated Care Ecosystems: A Socio-Technical Perspective

This book brings together research and theory about integrated care ecosystems with modern Socio-Technical Systems Design. It provides a practical framework for collaborative action and the potential for better care in every sense. By combining the aspirations, information, resources, activities, and the skills of public and private organizations, independent care providers, informal care givers, patients and other ecosystem actors, this framework makes possible results that none of the parties concerned can achieve independently It is both a design challenge and a call for innovation in how we think about health care co-creation. Illustrative stories from many countries highlight different aspects of integrated care ecosystems, their design and their functioning in ways that allow us to push the operating frontiers of what we today call our health care system. It explains what it means to design higher levels of coordination and collaboration into fragmented care ecosystems and explores who the participants should and can be in that process. Written for a broad audience including researchers, professionals, and policy makers, this book offers readers new thinking about what outcomes are possible and ways to achieve them.