Person-Centered Nursing in the Digital Era: Integrating Care Across Chronic Illness Trajectories
Heidi Holmen, Astrid Torbjørnsen, Jeanette Finderup, Tone Singstad, Tone Reinholdtsen Hjelle, Peter Forde Hougaard, Annesofie Lunde JensenIntroduction
People living with chronic illness constitute a heterogeneous and often multimorbid population whose needs evolve over time and across care settings. Person-centered care is central to achieving meaningful outcomes, increasingly supported by digital health technologies, but their integration must be adaptive to different phases of illness trajectories, responsive to the person’s goals and capacities, supporting clinical workflows and relationships, and attentive to equity, safety, and sustainability.
Purpose
The purpose of this practice update is to explore how digital health solutions can be integrated across chronic illness trajectories to support person-centered nursing care within specialized healthcare services. Through the authors’ extensive clinical and empirical experience with chronic care and digital health, fictional cases representing the concepts of personal, illness, and care trajectories were developed using iterative refinement and discussion upon the finalization of the cases. Then, the cases are the core of the articles’ examination of how digital solutions shape contemporary care practices, coordination work, and relationships over time. The cases illustrate the potential of digital technologies to support person-centered nursing and the risks of disruption when technologies are poorly aligned with the person’s goals, capacities, and everyday contexts. This clarifies how nurses are significant in ensuring person-centeredness in the development and implementation of digital health technologies.
Conclusion
Digital health technologies can strengthen person-centered nursing care across chronic illness trajectories when they are grounded in person-centered ethics, support shared narratives and partnerships, and are embedded in coherent workflows and governance structures. The philosophy of person-centered care must be explicitly integrated into the design, implementation, and use of digital solutions. Nursing leadership can shape digital practices that sustain continuity, dignity, and meaningful care over time. A practical step is nursing’s stewardship of patient narratives and digital tools can enable documentation of a concise “what matters” note for handoffs, updated at transitions.