One main challenge of health care systems in future will be the care and treatment of dementia patients. To their advanced age, dementia patients do not only have limitations in cognition, perception, and articulation, but also suffer from several other diseases (multimorbidity). These patients have sophisticated needs for assistance, care, and treatment relying on different health care sectors. Well-known communication and coordination deficits between sectors are intensified in the case of dementia, to the above described limitations. Coordination processes concerning the transition of patients from hospitals to inpatient or outpatient aftercare pose particularly difficult. To show a possible future direction for improving intersectoral care of dementia patients, we developed the web-based case management system CASEPLUS-SimPat as part of the project SimPat “Securing Integrated Care for Multi-morbid Patients with Dementia using an IT-based Service Concept”. CASEPLUS-SimPat allows health care professionals, hospital employees and general practitioners, to jointly access patient data and exchange information about the treatment of patients. The case management system was implemented in a three-tier architecture with a role-based authorization concept. A portal for relatives complements the system. By providing precise information and e-learning services, caring relatives are integrated into the care process. In a pilot test, CASEPLUS-SimPat shows a good usability. Adapting aspects, such as keywords used to structure entries will make it easier to find required information, and thus will increase usability. Next steps comprise integration of further health care professionals and care facilities as well as real-life testing in terms of feasibility and effectiveness.
Adoption processes are often heavily in°uenced by interpersonal communication. Marketing managers are increasingly trying to use these relationships to foster the market penetration of their products. In an empirical study of the US market for an innovative medical device, we survey the social network of (mostly chief) anesthetists from 151 hospitals. We con¯rm the in°uences from personal communication on individual adoption decisions through hazard regressions. We then use a multi-agent modeling framework trying to identify what seeding strategies would have been optimal to achieve a fast market penetration, i.e. which and how many anesthetists should be selected to initiate personal communication processes.
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