Situational Awareness Support to Enhance Teamwork in Collaborative Environments

Modern collaborative environments often provide an overwhelming amount of visual information on multiple displays. The multitude of personal and shared interaction devices leads to lack of awareness of team members on ongoing activities, and awareness of who is in control of shared artefacts. This research addresses the situational awareness (SA) support of multidisciplinary teams in co-located collaborative environments. This work aims at getting insights into design and evaluation of large displays systems that afford SA and effective teamwork

Improving access to health services – Challenges in Lean application

Purpose: Healthcare organisations face significant productivity pressures and are undergoing major service transformation. This paper serves to disseminate findings from a Lean healthcare project using a NHS Single Point of Access environment as the case study. It demonstrates the relevance and extent that Lean can be applied to this type of healthcare service setting. Design/methodology/approach: Action research was applied and Lean tools used to establish current state processes, identify wastes and develop service improvement opportunities based upon defined customer values. Findings: The quality of referral information was found to be the root cause of a number of process wastes and causes of failure for the service. Understanding the relationship and the nature of interaction between the service‟s customer/supplier led to more effective and sustainable service improvement opportunities and the co-creation of value. It was also recognised that not all the Lean principles could be applied to this type of healthcare setting. Practical implications: The study is useful to organisations using Lean to undertake service improvement activities. The paper outlines how extending the value stream beyond the organisation to include suppliers can lead to improved co-production and generation of service value. Originality/value: The study contributes to service productivity research by demonstrating the relevance and limitations of Lean application in a new healthcare service setting. The case study demonstrates the practical challenges of implementing Lean in reciprocal service design models and adds validity to existing contextual models

Addendum to Informatics for Health 2017: Advancing both science and practice

This article presents presentation and poster abstracts that were mistakenly omitted from the original publication

Knowledge-Intensive Processes: Characteristics, Requirements and Analysis of Contemporary Approaches

Engineering of knowledge-intensive processes (KiPs) is far from being mastered, since they are genuinely knowledge- and data-centric, and require substantial flexibility, at both design- and run-time. In this work, starting from a scientific literature analysis in the area of KiPs and from three real-world domains and application scenarios, we provide a precise characterization of KiPs. Furthermore, we devise some general requirements related to KiPs management and execution. Such requirements contribute to the definition of an evaluation framework to assess current system support for KiPs. To this end, we present a critical analysis on a number of existing process-oriented approaches by discussing their efficacy against the requirements

Adaptive Process Management in Cyber-Physical Domains

The increasing application of process-oriented approaches in new challenging cyber-physical domains beyond business computing (e.g., personalized healthcare, emergency management, factories of the future, home automation, etc.) has led to reconsider the level of flexibility and support required to manage complex processes in such domains. A cyber-physical domain is characterized by the presence of a cyber-physical system coordinating heterogeneous ICT components (PCs, smartphones, sensors, actuators) and involving real world entities (humans, machines, agents, robots, etc.) that perform complex tasks in the “physical” real world to achieve a common goal. The physical world, however, is not entirely predictable, and processes enacted in cyber-physical domains must be robust to unexpected conditions and adaptable to unanticipated exceptions. This demands a more flexible approach in process design and enactment, recognizing that in real-world environments it is not adequate to assume that all possible recovery activities can be predefined for dealing with the exceptions that can ensue. In this chapter, we tackle the above issue and we propose a general approach, a concrete framework and a process management system implementation, called SmartPM, for automatically adapting processes enacted in cyber-physical domains in case of unanticipated exceptions and exogenous events. The adaptation mechanism provided by SmartPM is based on declarative task specifications, execution monitoring for detecting failures and context changes at run-time, and automated planning techniques to self-repair the running process, without requiring to predefine any specific adaptation policy or exception handler at design-time

Electronic Health Records: Cure-all or Chronic Condition?

Computer-based information systems feature in almost every aspect of our lives, and yet most of us receive handwritten prescriptions when we visit our doctors and rely on paper-based medical records in our healthcare. Although electronic health record (EHR) systems have long been promoted as a cost-effective and efficient alternative to this situation, clear-cut evidence of their success has not been forthcoming. An examination of some of the underlying problems that prevent EHR systems from delivering the benefits that their proponents tout identifies four broad objectives - reducing cost, reducing errors, improving coordination and improving adherence to standards - and shows that they are not always met. The three possible causes for this failure to deliver involve problems with the codification of knowledge, group and tacit knowledge, and coordination and communication. There is, however, reason to be optimistic that EHR systems can fulfil a healthy part, if not all, of their potential