Background: "Integrative health care" has become a common term to describe teams of health care providers working together to provide patient care. However this term has not been welldefined and likely means many different things to different people. The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for describing, comparing and evaluating different forms of teamoriented health care practices that have evolved in Western health care systems.
This is one of the first studies to evaluate integrative health care. Studies like this are needed to develop appropriate methods to assess models of integrative health care delivery.
Creation of an optimal healing environment (OHE) in a clinical setting is a multifaceted undertaking and subject to a wide variety of developmental influences. While comprehensive definitions for OHE might provide sufficient guidance for communicating philosophy and values and developing patient-practitioner processes, direction for creating a supportive administrative structure or establishing an evaluation/research strategy is less defined. Operationalizing the concept of OHE by breaking it down into components such as values, structure, process, and measurement of outcomes, proved to be a useful framework for analyzing the evolution of our integrated care program. Future OHE initiatives may benefit from using this type of framework to assess readiness among cocreators prior to development and implementation, as a guide for ongoing evaluation of an OHE postimplementation and as a basis for comparing OHEs across a variety of clinical settings.
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