AidAdom: Supporting Inter-Organizational Coordination for Home Help and Healthcare Services Through a Web Platform

Purpose: From temporary need of help for household chores after a short stay at the hospital to complex healthcare due to chronic conditions, an important number of professional caregivers belonging to different organizations are involved in providing help and healthcare services at home. Despite the well-defined role of each professional, these organizations are complaining of a lack of coordination and visibility of each other work, especially in case of incident. Coordination between organizations appears here as essential but is at the same time the responsibility of all and of no one of the involved professionals. In this context, our research aims at supporting coordination for home care work through the design and implementation of a web platform. Methods: In order to ground the design of an inter-organizational coordination platform (AidAdom), we first studied the work practices and coordination issues of two help services providers through interviews and observation with different stakeholders (n = 11). Then we have conducted a pilot study at three homes (involving from 6 to 17 caregivers) during one month to evaluate the system use in the field as well as to address implementation issues at both technical and social levels. Results: We provide an account of inter-organizational coordination in home care and identify issues in terms of limited resources for articulation work and basic coordination information sharing requirements. This analysis supports the features of the AidAdom web platform that enable caregivers to easily register data and messages related to their interventions. The pilot study allowed us to identify deployment issues at regional scale. Conclusion: The AidAdom platform provides a lightweight system which enables organizations to share a minimal set of coordination information. Our future work is oriented toward opening the system to new help and healthcare service professionals and organizations. (C) 2018 AGBM. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.