Disease surveillance and patient care in remote regions: an exploratory study of collaboration among healthcare professionals in Amazonia

The development and deployment of information technology, particularly mobile tools, to support collaboration between different groups of healthcare professionals has been viewed as a promising way to improve disease surveillance and patient care in remote regions. The effects of global climate change combined with rapid changes to land cover and use in Amazonia are believed to be contributing to the spread of vector-borne emerging and neglected diseases. This makes empowering and providing support for local healthcare providers all the more important. We investigate the use of information technology in this context to support professionals whose activities range from diagnosing diseases and monitoring their spread to developing policies to deal with outbreaks. An analysis of stakeholders, their roles and requirements, is presented which encompasses results of fieldwork and of a process of design and prototyping complemented by questionnaires and targeted interviews. Findings are analysed with respect to the tasks of diagnosis, training of local healthcare professionals, and gathering, sharing and visualisation of data for purposes of epidemiological research and disease surveillance. Methodological issues regarding the elicitation of cooperation and collaboration requirements are discussed and implications are drawn with respect to the use of technology in tackling emerging and neglected diseases

Asynchronous Remote Medical Consultation for Ghana

Computer-mediated communication systems can be used to bridge the gap between doctors in underserved regions with local shortages of medical expertise and medical specialists worldwide. To this end, we describe the design of a prototype remote consultation system intended to provide the social, institutional and infrastructural context for sustained, self-organizing growth of a globally-distributed Ghanaian medical community. The design is grounded in an iterative design process that included two rounds of extended design fieldwork throughout Ghana and draws on three key design principles (social networks as a framework on which to build incentives within a self-organizing network; optional and incremental integration with existing referral mechanisms; and a weakly-connected, distributed architecture that allows for a highly interactive, responsive system despite failures in connectivity). We discuss initial experiences from an ongoing trial deployment in southern Ghana.Comment: 10 page

A telemedicine distributed system for cooperative medical diagnosis

Procceedings of: Eighteenth Annual Symposium on Computer Aplications in Medical Care, november 5-9, 1994, Washington, USA. Edited by Judy G. OzboltTelemedicine is changing the classicalform of health care delivery, dramatically increasing the number of new applications in which some type of distributed synchronous cooperation between health care professionals is required. This paper presents the design and development ofa telemedicine distributed system for cooperative medical diagnosis based on two new approaches: 1) a distributed layered architecture specially designed to add synchronous computer supported cooperative workfeatures either to new or existing medical applications; 2) the definition of a methodological procedure to design graphical user interfaces for telemedicine cooperative working scenarios. The cooperative work is supported by a collaborative toolkit that provides telepointing, window sharing, coordination and synchronization. Finally, we have implemented and installed the telemedicine system in clinical practice between two hospitals, providing teleconferencing facilities for cooperative decision support in haemodynamics studies. This specific implementation and a preliminary evaluation were accomplished under the Research Project FEST "Framework for European Services in Telemedicine" funded by the EU AIM Programme.This work is supported in part by EU - AIM FEST project no. A-201 1, and by grants CICYT TEMA TIC 92-1288-PB and TELEMEDICINA TIC 93-1279-E.Publicad

Sociotechnical Challenges of eHealth Technology for Patient Self-Management: A Systematic Review

Ageing of society and increase of time spent with chronic conditions challenge the traditional long-term care model. Assistive technology and eHealth are seen to play an important role when addressing these challenges. One prominent example are patient self-management systems. These systems not only transform the way patients with chronic conditions interact with the healthcare system, but also change work practices of care providers. This literature review addresses sociotechnical challenges of eHealth technologies with a strong collaborative component. As a result, four themes are identified and discussed.Comment: Volume 5 HEALTHIN

"It is Not Because You Have Tools that You Must use Them"

International audienceWe conducted a retrospective study on the experimental deployment of a telemedicine toolkit in ten nursing homes. The purpose of the experiment was to see whether the use of these toolkits could allow for better cooperation between nursing homes and the local emergency medical dispatch center to avoid sending costly vehicles and having elderly people unnecessarily discharged at the hospital. We investigated the domestication process of these toolkits by nurses and orderlies from the nursing homes. Our findings show different levels of domestication: for some of the nursing homes, the lack of practical relevance of the toolkit in emergencies and the difficulty to borrow artifacts from doctors prevented complete adoption. For three nursing homes, domestication occurred in an unexpected way in the sense that the objective of the domestication changed. These findings led us to provide recommendations for projects aimed at improving inter-organizational cooperation through artifacts

Group-Slicer: A collaborative extension of 3D-Slicer

AbstractIn this paper, we describe a first step towards a collaborative extension of the well-known 3D-Slicer; this platform is nowadays used as a standalone tool for both surgical planning and medical intervention. We show how this tool can be easily modified to make it collaborative so that it may constitute an integrated environment for expertise exchange as well as a useful tool for academic purposes

Development of an electronic medical report delivery system to 3G GSM mobile (cellular) phones for a medical imaging department

Author name used in this publication: Dagan FengAuthor name used in this publication: Michael FulhamRefereed conference paper2007-2008 > Academic research: refereed > Refereed conference paperVersion of RecordPublishe

Virtual Awareness Card for adaptability in Collaborative Virtual Environments

International audienceThis article exposes the concept of Virtual Awareness Card in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE). This concept allows users to send information about their preferences and their hardware and software properties. Our approach is focused on the Awareness in order to use the awareness information to ensure the adaptability of various sites in the collaborative environment. The VAC is used in the CVE during the synchronous and asynchronous sessions to assure a collaborative work using heterogeneous support and multitude tools. VAC concept is based on three awareness directives: Convenience Awareness, Preferential Awareness and Restrictive Awareness. The goal is ultimately to offer adapted workspace to increase the awareness among the collaborators. In function of information of Virtual Awareness Card, collaborators can interact with more possibilities and make more efficient use of workspace functionalities. We'll show with several scenarios the use of the VAC in CVE of telemedicine to show the increase of possibilities offered by this concept

Multidisciplinary medical team meetings: A field study of collaboration in health care

We present an observational study that was conducted to guide the design of an enhanced collaboration platform to support distributed multidisciplinary team meetings between two hospitals. Our goal was to find out how the breast cancer multidisciplinary team collaborates in their face-to-face meetings and in their discussions using an existing videoconferencing system and to identify obstacles and issues to their primary tasks. We identified a set of concerns around the way visibility and audibility affect the social cohesion of the group and impede communication and situation awareness between the distributed team. We also identified a parallel set of concerns around the difficulty of preparing and interacting around the medical images used in the meetings. These issues exposed a complex matrix of technical, social, procedural and organisational factors that affect the collaboration. We suggest potential directions for technical interventions in this setting

ECSCW 2011 Conference Supplement: European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Aarhus, 24.-28. September 2011

Dual eye-tracking (DUET) is a promising methodology to study and support collaborative work. The method consists of simultaneously recording the gaze of two collaborators working on a common task. The main themes addressed in the workshop are eye-tracking methodology (how to translate gaze measures into descriptions of joint action, how to measure and model gaze alignment between collaborators, how to address task specificity inherent to eye-tracking data) and more generally future applications of dual eye-tracking in CSCW. The DUET workshop will bring together scholars who currently develop the approach as well as a larger audience interested in applications of eye-tracking in collaborative situations. The workshop format will combine paper presentations and discussions. The papers are available online as PDF documents at http://www.dualeyetracking.org/DUET2011/