defined association between health matters as determined by one or more care actors
A low back pain, known for many years by the subject of care’s general practitioner (GP), treated several times by the physiotherapist who labelled it a scoliosis and currently a candidate for a specific orthopaedic intervention.
Type 2 diabetes treated by a GP, a nurse, an endocrinologist and a vascular surgeon.
The health conditions included in a care process.
Figure 12 — health thread (UML Representation)
A health thread reconciles a range of health matters reflecting the variety of scopes of care actors, particularly of care providers.
A health thread may be established by a team (e.g. a coordination committee).
A health thread can be built step-by-step, by allowing each care professional to add their perspective into a common health thread.
Under the responsibility of a designated care actor, a health thread linking several health matters can describe an episodes of care bundle, for instance a partial or comprehensive synthesis of care actor-related episodes of care.
A collective decision (before, during or after the care interventions) may define a health thread and so the idea of the “episode” accepted by all the care professionals involved.
A health thread may be considered an aggregation of health matters or health threads, or both.