Design of a patient-centric, service-oriented health care navigation system for a local health integration network

Efficient and timely access to health care services has a profound impact on the well-being of individuals. A local health integration network (LHIN) located in South-western Ontario, Canada, is mandated to plan, identify, integrate, and fund regional health care services through its 88 member agencies. However, for the public, it is difficult to locate the right services at the right time due to the absence of a system-level navigation tool. In this ongoing system design project, we discuss a proposed patient-centric, service-oriented navigation system to be used by the public for accessing the regional health care services funded by the LHIN. We also propose that basic building blocks of service design be incorporated into the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology for developing an evaluative framework for assessing the impact of service design elements on the user's acceptance and usage of technology such as our web-based health care navigation tool.