Towards an information-centric architecture framework for health information logistics: a design science research study

Background: Integrated care fundamentally depends on timely awareness and access to distributed patient records. However, patients with multimorbidity navigate complex, circular pathways, creating information fragmentation that compromises safety and efficiency. Current Health Information Systems often lack robust frameworks for inter-organizational Data Management (DM). This study aims to design a conceptual information architecture framework to resolve systemic gaps in awareness, access, and the integration of the patient’s voice. Methods: Applying Design Science Research (DSR), this study synthesizes rigor from a scoping review with relevance from a longitudinal analysis of 14 multimorbid patients (1954–2024). A representative 19-year user scenario was validated by clinical expertise, and along with root-cause and stakeholder analysis, systemic failures in information logistics were explicated. High-level functional and non-functional requirements were iteratively derived, foregrounding Information Governance (IG), DM, and Security and Privacy as essential constraints. Results: The resulting artifact is a prescriptive information-centric architecture framework (meta-artifact). The layered, modular design decouples metadata, clinical codes, and location pointers into lightweight information tokens, enabling a paradigm shift from physical record replication to governed virtual access. This structure separates concerns across user interaction, pathway logic, and secure storage, providing the structural flexibility required for complex inter-organizational DM. Critically, Health Information Quality (HIQ) is positioned as the functional mechanism to operationalize DM, enforcing structural imperatives (R6–R7) for data accuracy, currency, and contextual relevance. These mechanisms directly mitigate empirically identified failures such as data duplication (F1, F2) and coordination delays (F4). Conceptual feasibility was demonstrated through an acute care transition and discharge use case. Conclusions: This study contributes reusable prescriptive design knowledge, validating the utility of architectural frameworks in solving socio-technical information logistics problems. By embedding Security and Privacy, and IG and DM as authoritative vertical pillars, and operationalizing DM through HIQ, the architecture facilitates high-quality information assets to support inter-organizational information logistics, data-driven opportunities, proactive awareness, and on-demand virtual access, while sustaining interprofessional trust and collaboration. The standards- and vendor-neutral design ensures international relevance and accommodates emerging technologies, such as blockchain and AI. This framework provides a verifiable blueprint in which clinical reasoning and patient-centric pathways guide information logistics.