Home Healthcare Process: Challenges and Open Issues
This work addresses organizational challenges in home healthcare for improving efficiency and quality, but it is incremental as it builds on existing process research.
The paper tackles the challenge of implementing ICT-home healthcare projects by adopting a process approach to highlight organizational aspects, examining home healthcare processes from complexity and dynamics perspectives to illustrate system requirements, and proposing initial solutions based on experiences from three process research communities.
Home healthcare is part of the most critical research and development healthcare areas. The objective is to decentralize healthcare, leading to a shift from in-hospital care to more advanced home healthcare, while improving efficiency, individualisation, equity and quality of healthcare delivery and limiting financial resources. In this paper, we adopt a process approach to tackle the home healthcare domain in order to highlight the importance of organisational aspects in the success of an ICT-home healthcare project. Such projects should be supported by an automated system, called in this paper, Home Healthcare support system. We examine HH processes from two selected perspectives (complexity and dynamics) to illustrate the requirements of a HH support system. We advocate that satisfying these requirements is part of the most important challenges in the home healthcare research domain and we propose first track of solutions by attempting to benefit from past experiences in 3 process research communities.