A Reference Architecture Approach for Pathway-Based Patient Integration

The active integration of a patient into his/her own care process offers great potentials for improving care quality. With this regard, patient portals are frequently referenced for enabling patient integration. Existing solutions primarily focus on the access to electronic health records but do not aim for the integration of cross institutional information about the course of treatment itself - known as patient pathway. Thus, this paper proposes a reference architecture for the integration of pathway systems into patient portals. High-level requirements have been captured from both a user's perspective and a theory perspective. Therefore, a large-scale patient survey was conducted within a general design science research approach. They were transformed into appropriate modules and components of a reference architecture. Its applicability is demonstratively shown by the development of a patient portal for Multiple Sclerosis patients.