Provider information and resource foraging in healthcare delivery

Abstract

The objective of this research was to develop an empirically supported language for describing strategies and processes that healthcare providers utilise to obtain, share and use resources during healthcare delivery. A combination of observational data from clinical providers and reviews of prior literature in the resource foraging domain have resulted in an improved theoretical framework of multidimensional resource foraging. Results of the literature review indicate that existing theories of resource foraging and previous medical literature on taxonomies of healthcare provider tasks are insufficient to describe the demands and requirements for team-based, event-driven, healthcare task coordination. This improved framework provides a significant advance in both the methodology and measurement of resource foraging, and patient care task coordination among providers across a range of healthcare settings.