Putting analytics into action in care coordination research: Emerging issues and potential solutions

Care coordination involves shaping patient care activities and sharing information among all participants concerned with a patient's care to achieve safe and effective care. The objectives of care coordination are to promote sharing of patients' clinical information, keep patients and families informed, and manage effective referrals and care transitions. Failures in care coordination account for a large amount of waste per year in the United States. Many innovative healthcare organizations have recently recognized the danger of poorly coordinated care and have implemented analytics to improve it. Therefore, more analytics-based research (especially combining explanatory analytics with predictive analytics) is needed to direct efforts to improve care coordination. This paper focuses on systematically studying the extant literature to understand how analytics play a role in improving care coordination. Our goal is to identify a set of key research questions that would lead to new research areas in the use of analytics for care coordination. Based on these questions, we offer new analytics solution pathways to care coordination problems.