CaDHealth: Designing and Prototyping for Cross-Boundary Decision Support in E-Health

Abstract

This paper presents the design of Cad Health, a system aimed at enabling knowledge and work practice transfer among clinicians across geographical, regional and workplace boundaries for effective clinical decision support in e-health. The system offers a unifying structure that allows clinicians to make sense of clinical work situations across regional and workplace boundaries in an e-health environment. The approach we have taken in Cad Health is motivated by the fact that 1) patterns of clinical work practice have been found to vary significantly across work settings, and 2) the contextual cues and practice-based knowledge, which are offered by common problem solving contexts in co-located work settings, and which enable clinicians, in such settings, to share information and knowledge to support one another's clinical decision making do not exist in e-health and other distributed work contexts. In particular, we highlight a number of user-informed design considerations, and describe the architecture and prototype of Cad Health.