JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Healthcare delivery is often fragmented, with different services being delivered by different organizations. Various forms of teamwork are often used in healthcare, aiming to mitigate the challenges related to this fragmentation. One example of teamwork in mental health is Flexible Assertive Community Treatment (FACT). FACT is a model for comprehensive and integrated care for patients with long-term, serious mental illness. FACT teams deliver services using assertive outreach to treat patients who can be hard to reach by the health care service. However, Norwegian FACT teams have issues with their current e-health solutions related to the fragmentation of healthcare.

Objective:

This study aims to identify requirements and develop use cases and use case diagrams for e-health solutions that support effective teamwork within FACT teams, using them as a case study for collaborative healthcare delivery.

Methods:

A framework of design science was used to explicate the problem of e-health solutions in FACT teams. This included doing the sub-activities of defining the problem precisely, positioning and justifying the problem, and finding root causes. Based on this explication, we derived a set of requirements, use cases and use case diagrams for FACT teams.

Results:

We present the explication of the problem of e-health in Norwegian FACT teams. Building of this result, we present functional and non-functional requirements for electronic health records, electronic whiteboards, video conference solutions and digital questionnaires. Improved integration across these systems is a recurring need. We also provide use cases and diagrams illustrating system use in practice.

Conclusions:

FACT teams in Norway require more integrated and tailored e-health solutions. The requirements and use cases presented in this study offer a foundation for developing tools that better support the collaborative and mobile nature of FACT team operations.