A social network framework to explore healthcare collaboration

A patient-centric approach to healthcare leads to an informal social network among medical professionals. This chapter presents a research framework to: (1) identify the collaboration structure among physicians that is effective and efficient for patients; (2) discover effective structural attributes of a collaboration network that evolves during the course of providing care; and (3) explore the impact of socio-demographic characteristics of healthcare professionals, patients, and hospitals on collaboration structures, from the point of view of measurable outcomes such as cost and quality of care. The framework uses illustrative examples drawn from a data set of patients undergoing hip replacement surgery. The practical application of the proposed framework reveals structures of physicians' collaborations that are not favourable to cost and quality of care measures such as readmission rate. The authors believe that such a framework will enable healthcare managers and administrators to evaluate the collaborative work environment within their respective healthcare organisations.