ICT-driven improvement of interprofessional collaboration between a rural clinic and nursing home: A mixed method
Section snippets
Background
The health care of older people involves numerous complicated problems. The elderly often have a variety of medical issues, which may require them to go to multiple medical institutions regularly.1 However, attending multiple medical institutions may cause serious problems, such as polypharmacy and poor management of multimorbidity.2,3 Additionally, to care for these elderly people, many kinds of medical professionals must collaborate.4 It is clear that effective collaboration will contribute
Method
A concurrent mixed methods study was carried out over a two-month period to inquire about actual usage of ICT in rural interprofessional collaboration between physicians and nursing home staff. As a quantitative inquiry, patients’ conditions, including their background and contents, frequency, and results of medical assessments, were gathered from the database of the ICT and electronic medical records in the clinic. In addition, as a qualitative inquiry, one-on-one interviews were carried out
The relationship between patients’ demographic data and ICT usage
The total number of participating patients was 40. Their average age was 88, and the percentage of male participants was 30%. During the study, half of the patients had changes in their conditions, which were shared on the ICT system between nursing home staff and the clinic's physicians (these participants were defined as the ICT group). The other half did not experience changes to their condition during that time (defined as the non-ICT group). There were no statistical differences regarding
Discussion
This study indicates that interprofessional collaboration via ICT between a clinic and a nursing home, involving sharing patients' information, can be carried out effectively and without long delays. Shared contents were different for nurses and physicians, and a variety of medical information was shared. Through qualitative one-on-one interviews, it was found that ICT system application can drive seamless collaboration and makes both medical and care staff feel more at ease. However, there is
Conclusion
Use of ICT in interprofessional collaboration between clinic physicians and nurses at nursing homes can make their collaboration effective. Effective usage of ICT can lead to a sense of safety and security not only for nurses, but also for care workers. To improve and promote the use of ICT, there should be continual usage and facilitation of veteran nurses to overcome their difficulties in dealing with electronic devices.
Ethical consideration
This study was approved by the Unnan City Hospital Clinical Ethics Committee.
Funding
No funding.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Ryuichi Ohta: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Project administration. Yoshinori Ryu: Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - review & editing, Project administration. Mikiya Sato: Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Tetsuhiro Maeno: Supervision.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interests.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the participants that took part in this study.
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