Using a patient-centered approach for health and social care integration.

The drive in using health and social care resources more effectively has resulted in undertaking various efforts towards better coordination in order to improve patient-centered and personalized care for the individuals. This requires horizontal integration in terms of processes among health and social care organizations existing information systems (ISs) and personal health records (PHRs) in order to enable integrated patient information sharing among all the health and social care staff and individuals involved. Service-oriented and business process management (BPM) technologies are considered most appropriate for achieving such integration especially when is required to change existing processes and to integrate diverse information systems. On these grounds, a patient-centered approach is proposed for redesigning health and social care processes and for integrating diverse ISs and PHRs with the objective to meet holistic care goals.