Patient Safety in Community Care

Abstract

The increasing number of elderly people in need of health and social care is putting pressure on current services to develop better ways of providing integrated care in the community. It is a widely held belief that e-health technologies have great potential in enabling and achieving this goal. This chapter reviews a number of technologies used for this purpose: telecare, telehealth, telemedicine, electronic patient record systems, and technologies to support mobile working. In each case, technocentric-design approaches have led to problematic implementations and failures to achieve adoption into the routine of delivering healthcare. An examination of attempts to implement major changes in the service delivery of integrated care shows that e-health technologies can be successfully implemented when they are seen as an intrinsic part of the creation of a complete system. However, the design process required for successful delivery of these services is challenging; it requires sustained and integrated development work by clinical staff and technologists coordinating their work on process changes, organisational developments, and technology implementations.