The overall goal of the CITH project will design, develop ,and test IT applications and services to help healthcare professionals and patients with ICDs (advanced pacemakers) get an overview of the patient’s condition for timely and adequate intervention.

The project focuses on the treatment of patients with ICDs at The Hearth Centre at Rigshospitalet with the overall goal to improve both communication and collaboration between all involved parties. This will improve the quality of life for the patients as well as the quality and efficiency of treatment and care plans.

Another goal for the project is to develop the conceptual basis for successful IT solutions for shared care (when the responsibility for the healthcare of the patient is shared between individuals or teams who are parts of separate organizations, or when substantial organizational boundaries exist) applying a socio-technical perspective.

The combination of telemedicine and shared care programs addresses the problem of supporting communication across institutional and professional boundaries, in highly heterogeneous networks of healthcare professionals and patients. This is not a simple of straightforward task. Research on organizational communication has consistently shown that working across functional boundaries and sharing knowledge is difficult, because knowledge is localized, embedded and invested in practice.