Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Organizations can work together in various ways to deliver health care to a population. One way is by developing a network, where multiple organizations work together to achieve shared goals, but maintain their autonomy. Although the network model is increasing being used in Canada and around the world to provide better coordinated health care, little is known about the effectiveness of this model. The goal of my research is to develop and test a framework to evaluate the effectiveness of this network model. The first step of this research is gain an understanding of what is known from the existing literature on the subject. This study aimed to examine the extent, range and nature of network effectiveness research activity involving health care systems and to identifying gaps in the existing research literature. The study revealed that very little research has been conducted on this topic.