Managing the Process Conglomeration in Health and Social Care

The organisation and processes of today’s health and social care are becoming ever more complex as a consequence of societal trends, including an ageing population and an increased reliance on care at home. One aspect of the increased complexity is that a single patient may receive care from several separate care providers, which easily results in situations with potentially incoherent, uncoordinated and interfering care processes. In order to describe and analyse such situations, the paper introduces the notion of a process conglomeration. This is defined as a set of patient care processes that all influence the same patient, which are overlapping in time, and that all have the goal of improving or maintaining the health and social wellbeing of the patient. Problems and challenges of process conglomerations are investigated using coordination theory and speech act theory. In order to address the challenges, a number of information services are proposed.