Characterizing Collaborative Workflow and Health Information Technology

Abstract

While several societal and economic factors have necessitated more team-based care delivery, it remains a challenge to implement it in practice. Health information technology (IT) can support team-based care delivery, but there is currently a gap between the workflow of teams and the technology that we design to support it. To address this gap, we first formalize team-based workflows according to structural and behavioral aspects. Then, we describe collaborative workflows, and considerations for health IT design to support collaborative workflows. Health IT design for collaborative workflow goes beyond just automating the task at hand, as collaborative workflows are a social construction between data, people and processes; and we need to understand how these connections form prior to introducing technology to automate it. Collaborative workflows are not static, but rather dynamic processes. Health IT design therefore needs to be flexible so that it can evolve along with the collaborative processes that it is automating.