Socio-technical platforms for care transformation: An integrative synthesis and conceptualization

This paper is at the intersection of two trends in healthcare, integrated care (IC) and digitalization. These advancements aim to mitigate challenges associated with the management of chronic and multimorbid conditions which forms the bulk of healthcare expenditure. Healthcare systems are increasingly burdened and there is rampant fragmentation in service provisioning and technological innovation. However, IC models show promise and stand to benefit greatly from emerging digital health platform solutions. These socio-technical interventions are relatively nascent and thus lack comprehensive analysis. Therefore, this study conceptualizes and describes these emerging solutions with an integrative literature review and a qualitative analysis that identifies 26 comprehensive platform socio-technical solutions that provide coordination in the chronic care ecosystem. The findings offer a detailed overview and an integrative synthesis that outlines the interventions' architectures, integrating the elements of people, processes, and technology in a multi-level IC framework. This sheds light on the complex orchestration needed for managing these solutions and helps researchers and decision makers better understand the complexity and challenges of transformative healthcare. Development barriers and gaps for further research are also explored.