Patient experiences with informational discontinuity of care: Bridging the gaps

Informational continuity of care is a central component of effective health care delivery and patient management but is often not achieved, leaving patients to compensate for or suffer from the burden of informational discontinuity of care. Fragmentation and siloed care delivery and communication within and across care settings present significant challenges to informational continuity of care. This is especially the case in the context of adverse drug events (ADEs), the harmful and unanticipated outcomes of medication use. This paper introduces a project called ActionADE that is intended to bridge informational gaps related to ADEs by enabling the documentation and communication of patient-specific ADE information. It contributes to literature concerned with information sharing in healthcare through a focus on patient views about sharing medication information through the design of an ADE reporting system, and explores implications for system design within a sociotechnical framework.