Concept Mapping in developing an indicator framework for coordinated health care

There are increasing calls for improvement of the coordination of health care services, especially the ones provided to chronically ill patients. Coordinated health care requires a different approach to quality indicators than the one adopted in fragmented health care delivery. Therefore, the objective of this study was to develop an indicator framework that will fit the coordinated health care setting. Concept Mapping was used to cluster the items representing care coordination, position them on a map and analyse their contents. Multidimensional scaling was applied to develop a framework. The elements of coordinated care had been previously identified based on a review of literature. They served as an input to a Delphi procedure applied in the subsequent stage of the research.

There were 95 elements identified and grouped into nine clusters. The clusters were labelled as “Organisation of health care delivery”, “Patient support”, “Support for clinical decisions”, “Information integration”, “Focus on the patient”, “Patient pathway management”, “Cross-sectoral cooperation”, “Coordination of activities”, and “Soft elements”. The proposed indicator framework is based on the health care system experts’ perspective and is believed to be suitable for managing quality in coordinated health care practice. The findings suggest that Concept Mapping is a perfect way for generating indicator frameworks.