Coordinating intra-sector services in healthcare: Requirements and elements that managers should take into account

This study furthers the on-going debate about the design of efficient, high-quality healthcare delivery by adding new insights about the coordination of intra-sector services. Insights come from an embedded single case study about the design of a Regional Agency in Lombardy (Northern Italy) to coordinate twelve previously autonomous Emergency Response Centres (ERCs) by means of a common management hierarchy. This case offered the possibility to investigate the peculiarities of intra-sector coordination and propose a conceptual framework to support healthcare managers in their design. This framework – that is based on and develops a previous contribution by Alter and Hage (1993) – points out three requirements (comprehensiveness, accessibility and compatibility) that coordinated intra-sector services should satisfy and four elements (services, resources (professionals and technologies), users’ needs, and information (operational data and feedbacks)) that should be taken into account in the design stage.