Introduction

--- The program expired in 2008 ---

HealthcareIT – HIT is an interdisciplinary program that focuses on IT-support for highly distributed and heterogeneous networks of people, organizations, and resources within the healtcare sector. Researchers and policy makers have increasingly realized that effective communication and collaboration between healthcare professionals and patients – often referred to as patient empowerment – must form the cornerstone of healthcare in the future.

Patient empowerment requires that designers of IT-systems for communication and coordination within healthcare look beyond traditional concepts of electronic patient records and realize that health care work is highly interactive and communicative in nature. The challenge is to build collaborative health information systems (CHIS) that explicitly support the interdependent roles of patients and health care professionals in achieving health care goals.