A context-aware medical instant message middleware

Abstract

Communication or the lack of it has been complained to be a major contributor to medical errors in healthcare. To enhance communication in hospital, diverse communication mechanisms are proposed. However, human directed communication in a complex clinical setting in which many people play diverse roles and need to collaborate in many parallel tasks is always in chaos and inefficient. Context-aware communication which can help target who should be communicated and what information should be provided for different scenarios has the potential to improve the communication in hospital. This paper proposes a flexible, automated and asynchronous context-aware medical instant message (IM) middleware which support dispatch, forward and routing different message to the right person in the right time based on the context information. A prototype of this IM communication middleware was implemented in real clinical setting for evaluation. The preliminary results demonstrate its novel features and clinical feasibility.