Dignity Care: Person-centered care supported by digital tools
Description
10% of the patients who need healthcare services the most account for 2/3 of the costs. These patients often have multiple diagnoses and long-term healthcare needs. Unfortunately, high costs do not guarantee good service quality, as these patients often experience fragmented care pathways, with gaps and overlaps between different providers.
One reason for these quality issues is the lack of tools for information flow between providers. Despite increasing digitalization of healthcare services, neither the professionals nor the patients have access to relevant documentation across the system. We also lack knowledge about how a shared digital tool that supports collaboration between patients and professionals in complex care pathways should look.
There is a need for both healthcare innovation to improve care pathways for patients with complex and long-term needs, and technical innovation in the digital tools that support such patient pathways.
Goals
Overall Goal
To improve healthcare services for chronically ill patients with long-term complex needs through the development of the Dignity Care tool, which will help healthcare professionals gain a better overview of complex and long-term care pathways.
Subgoals
Dignity Care will address the following questions:
- What are the effects of giving healthcare professionals access to the three most important sources of information about the care pathway: General Practitioner, municipal services, and hospital records?
- What is the effect of giving healthcare professionals access to a summary of "what is important to the patient" along with summaries of medical history and plans for the patient’s main medical challenges?
If we succeed, our results will contribute to a quality standard for digital collaboration tools in healthcare. Our project aims to create digitally supported, person-centered healthcare services that benefit both patients and professionals.
Method
Dignity Care collaborates with 10 patient partners who live with multiple concurrent diagnoses. They have consented to share their electronic medical records with us, providing insight into how the healthcare system documents care pathways for individuals with complex and long-term needs.
We have developed the Dignity Care (DC) tool in three versions:
- A tool that represents "standard services" – where the healthcare worker only has access to information within their own organization.
- A tool that also displays all information from three sources on the same timeline (General Practitioner, hospital, and municipal services).
- A tool that shows summaries of the patient’s voice and medical history.
In a randomized controlled trial (RCT), we are inviting early-career doctors (resident physicians) to compare how these three tools support the quality of information captured regarding: 1) Current medical issues, 2) Social and personal factors affecting their health situation, 3) What is important to the patient, 4) Key measures for moving forward, 5) Who should be involved in the action plan.
A panel of three doctors (General Practitioner, geriatrician, and resident physician) will conduct a blinded evaluation of the quality of the summaries and action plans. Additionally, we will conduct a process evaluation to understand how healthcare workers experience using the tool to gain an overview.