Towards the collaborative hospital: Harnessing the potential of enabling care processes and structures

Hospitals are increasingly faced with conflicting demands as they have to respond to increasing patient demands as well as financial, clinical and quality challenges. To handle these demands the hospital need to reconfigure its organization, and we propose to build on a concept for the collaborative hospital as new organizational form which is better equipped to respond to the challenges facing modern hospitals. The collaborative hospital is an ambidextrous organization that opens for pursuing both exploration and exploitation within the same organizational structure. The basic principles of the collaborative hospital concern the creation of an appropriate balance between standardization and local autonomy, shared purpose centred around providing the best possible care, and use of enabling structures that sustain the new ways of collaborative work. The chapter builds on the theoretical framework of the collaborative organization which is used for a discussion of theoretical and empirical aspects of the collaborative hospital.