Awareness-based scheduling in a home care clinical information system

In home care, workers from different disciplines treat patients in their homes. However, workers who treat a shared patient are mobile and rarely see each other face-to-face, so it is difficult for them to maintain awareness of others' activities. In this paper, we discuss one aspect of these information limitations by considering how limited awareness of others' schedules influences work patterns in home care. We identify and discuss several problems that arise from incomplete information about others' schedules. We examine design approaches for supporting mutual awareness of others' schedules by presenting Mohoc, a point-of-care clinical information system for workers in Saskatoon District Health, and the results of a 2(1/2)-month field trial we carried out with the system.