Collaborative Approach for Sustainable Citizen-Centered Health Care

Health care systems are in transition to citizen-centered care with focus on prevention, proactive and personalized services and healthy lifestyles. Innovative technologies enable citizens’ empowerment and allow them to manage their complete health and wellness. Citizen-centered tools collect life-long cross-institutional information and data from health care providers and citizens. From the health care organizations viewpoint the new paradigm implies changes in the ways how the services are produced, how they are offered for use and in the contents of the services. Research with the citizen-centered health paradigm has been active and many significant results have been achieved, for instance improvements in citizens’ lifestyle, weight loss, reduction of the duration of hospitalization, better accessibility of health related information and improved communication between the care providers. Based on our literature review we present in this chapter the approaches, achievements, barriers and challenges of citizen-centered health paradigm. We propose a new innovative approach to build the next generation, collaborative health information space that links the care providers and citizens together and helps them to access the distributed health resources any time anywhere. The visional, sustainable citizen-centered health environment offers means to gradually migrate from the current situation to a citizen-centered care environment where citizens have a participatory role in health care activities.