Cooperation and Coordination Models in Future Healthcare... Scenarions and IT Enabler

Introduction

Health care in Germany represents one of the major sectors of the economy. With annual expenditure of 230 Bill. euro and more than 4 Mil. employees.  There is strong pressure to reduce costs of delivery on both private & public providers. For this reason it is critical that all stakeholders increase their efficiency in service delivery.  To achieve this, new cooperation forms need to be established, creating new coordination models to boost the communication and the data exchange between the care providers. In addition their also needs to be new changes to existing laws to carry cross sector cooperation and networking in an integrated care context.

Research

The first step of the research intention is analyse and evaluation of the current cooperation and networking models in the healthcare sector. This includes for each care provider the benefits of the involved cooperation. The target is to prepare an overall view of the integrated care networks with all the benefits and WIN-WIN structures currently available in the healthcare system. This includes the requirements of all networking varieties starting from small general practitioner to enterprise wide cross sectoral healthcare solutions. This overview serves as a template on which the cooperation models are assessed based on care specific criteria.

The second step of the research is to illustrate the strengths/Weaknesses of each cooperation model analysed above. With systematic and stereotypical based pattern analysis, the research will focus on possible future cooperation and coordination scenarios that can occur in the healthcare sector to amplify the efficiencies and to optimize the care process itself. The main focus in all the proposed solutions/scenarios is to make them sustainable and accomplishable. Network structures outside the healthcare sector in Germany for example in the nearby EU and the US can give assistance in terms of know-how, experience and structure models.

Based on the developed models, trend analysis and scenarios, an estimation of the implications on the strategic orientation of all stakeholders in the care process will be made.  These models can compromise of other networking scenarios to optimize the care process with outsourcing models used to increase the efficiency of the care provider.

The specialization trends in the healthcare sector and networking opportunities may have a huge impact on the product portfolio and the solutions of the IT solution provider.

IT presents an inalienable part of the cooperation/coordination process and communication infrastructure between the care providers. The aim of this part of the research is to investigate how dedicated IT solutions can enable the future cooperation/coordination scenarios worked out above. The aims is to provide seamless integration between all care network nodes. This requires a detailed interface description between the nodes which allows for a cross sector information exchange, patient focused and efficient care process.  

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