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

• We advanced Alter and Hage’s framework for service design in the context of healthcare.
• Our framework captures the key factors for coordinating previously isolated services.
• Accessibility to resources is the most debated factor by healthcare practitioners.
• Feedback is the lowest debated factor by healthcare practitioners.
• Healthcare practitioners’ perspective is salient to increase acceptability of change.

SummaryThis 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.