Getting the Benefit from Electronic Patient Information that Crosses Organisational Boundaries – Final Report NIHR Service Delivery and Organisation Programme

Within the two LHCs studied, there are areas in which substantial progress has been made in creating working forms of integrated care in healthcare pathways. These islands of progress have produced solutions that are quite different from one another and they are the result of evolutionary processes over several years in the face of many difficulties. As a result, there are parts of the systems development process that are mature in the ways in which the challenge of integrated design is tackled. We would single out, for example, the long tradition that has now built up for engaging ‘hybrids’ as the go-betweens in the endless dialogue between informatics specialists and the healthcare user community. However, current electronic support for integrated care can only be described as patchy and, to build on what is already in place, there is a need to create more mature systems development processes that can cope with the many challenges of bringing together a diverse set of stakeholder interests across a number of different healthcare agencies to create the sociotechnical systems necessary to serve the specific needs of healthcare pathways.