A distributed coordination platform for home care: analysis, framework and prototype

Good cooperation between health care (HC) professionals, patient, and family is indispensable during homecare as mentioned in reports and analyses from different countries. In a French National project named coordination for the quality of care (COQUAS), we aimed to address the problem of improving such cooperation with current tools and techniques. We hypothesized that, as in some other domains, a better integration of use and users in informatics systems could improve the usefulness of the cooperative tool. The first part of this paper is devoted to the cognitive analysis of the homecare process and highlights the requirements which should be met according to this analysis. We describe some specific features of asynchronous cooperation and some communication issues in the cooperation of HC workers. We then detail the analysis of the homecare process: methodology, description of the processes, cognitive activity analyses, and of the requirements which flow from this analysis. The second part of this paper proposes a framework and then describes a modular system prototype, designed to take into account these requirements, including aspects of both cooperation and interoperability. It uses a meta-description of actions and information derived from a cognitive study to build dynamically the interface settings; it respects the current trend in distributed architecture and uses XML communication of messages, manages complex coordination with a workflow and allows mobile work. The last part of the paper presents the evaluation which has been done with the implemented prototype, with actual homecare users.