ICTs, E-Health, and Multidisciplinary Healthcare Teams: Promises and Challenges

Icts And The Promises Of Multidisciplinary Healthcare Teams

Multidisciplinary care is referred to as an integrated team approach to healthcare, where relevant health care professionals evaluate treatment options and jointly develop a treatment plan for patients (Robertson, Li, O’Hara, & Hansen, 2010; Salerno, 2015; Scholl & Olaniran, 2013). For example, multidisciplinary teams can include surgeons, nutritionists, radiologists, pathologists, oncologists and social workers along with general practitioners or primary care physicians. Therefore, hospital physicians, and nurses may provide healthcare services either through office or home visits in collaboration with other healthcare providers including general practitioners with the aid of ICTs. ICTs facilitate the transfer of recorded data back to hospital environment (Salerno, 2015). Thus, ICTs represent the tools for increasing cooperation between different health professions across different settings and institutions, which in a way helps foster the active/interactive role by patients, caregivers and other entities in caregiving (Scholl & Olaniran, 2013; Stellato et al., 2015a, 2015b).