A Sense of Coherence Approach to Improving Patient Experience Using Information Infrastructure Modeling: Design Science Research (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND The ways in which healthcare’s physical and social environments interact with an individual, patient or care provider, is a primary driver of their experience within that organisation. Healthcare provider organisations are complex and dynamic environments. Increasingly, the capabilities required to successfully interact with their constituents are critically dependent on the information infrastructure they have in place that enables people, both patients and staff, to optimally work together in the delivery of their clinical and operational objectives. OBJECTIVE The challenge is how to assemble the information systems in healthcare to support and potentially innovate patients' experience through connecting and orchestrating the synergy between people, processes, and systems. METHODS It is necessary to understand the needs of healthcare providers and patients to address this challenge at a level that is relevant to information process design and technology development. This paper describes the design science research that combines the Sense of Coherence theory with established information infrastructure maturity, demonstrating the coalescence of two distinct conceptual frameworks. This research provides a method to define a positive and supportive experience and link this to the support of an information technology environment. RESULTS This research results in a methodology for describing patient experience in a form that is relevant to information infrastructure design, articulating a pathway from information infrastructure to patient experience. It proposes that patient experience can be pragmatically viewed in terms of the established Sense of Coherence theory with its ability to identify and guide resources to modulate a patient’s environmental stressors. The research establishes a framework for determining and optimizing the capability of a facility’s information infrastructure to support the Sense of Coherence defined experiences of its patients. CONCLUSIONS This research provides a method for healthcare provider organisations to better understand and assess the ability of their current information infrastructure to support and improve the patient experience. The tool assists providers to define their technology dependent operational goals around patient experience and consequently identify the information capabilities needed and the associated systems to support this. This paper details an approach to describing information infrastructure within an experience-oriented framework that enables the impact of technology on experience to be explicitly designed. The contribution to knowledge is a new perspective on modelling how information infrastructure can contribute to supportive health-promoting environments.