Integrated Care Partnerships – Organizational Behaviour in Co-Operation Networks

Introduction: Increasing costs and decreasing hospital staying time require network-like co-operations (Vogd 2009), thus enforcing integrated care partnerships. The assumption is that a better co-operation leads to faster transitions of patients from one provider to the next instance and as a result, leads to more financial benefits from medical treatments. Therefore, each involved organisation has to manage tasks that appear at the interfaces between the co-operating organisations to enable trouble-free workflows within this network. However, in integrated care partnerships, each party is exposed to both hierar…