Introduction
EVENTS
Worldwide, conventional disease-oriented approaches are being replaced by innovative, preventive, patient-centered health care services with digital health tools that support vertical (between the hospital and the community) and horizontal (between health and social services) integration. However, despite the broad consensus there are still significant challenges in ensuring care continuum across health organizations [In many cases, cooperation among health care tiers and providers needs digital support for secure bidirectional and instantaneous communication to avoid information gaps or duplications and assist the care team in making shared decisions. Moreover, the nondeterministic nature of health care services requires a shift in focus from a set of prescriptive tasks to context-dependent, flexible, often-evolving care plans aimed at achieving optimal outcomes for each patient.In 2001, adaptive case management (ACM) was introduced in the workflow management literature to support knowledge workers (eg, physicians, architects, and lawyers) [The current study presents the precommercial experience of co-design and prototyping of a digital health tool (Health Circuit) with an ACM approach during the period from 2019 to 2021. The process had 2 consecutive steps. In an initial phase, from 2019 to 2020, the feasibility of a secure bidirectional communication channel was tested for improving the management of complex chronic patients with high risk of hospitalization. In a second phase (2020-2021), ACM principles were incorporated to enable virtual sharing of care plans among all team members of an innovative prehabilitation service [While the first pilot study aimed to analyze the service’s potential with respect to management of unplanned events and patient self-management, both studies shared the common objective of assessing the Health Circuit approach with respect to its usability and acceptability as perceived by end users.