Developing Collaborative Technologies for Interdisciplinary Care Teams: What Does This Mean in the Case of Medication Reconciliation?

During care transitions within the hospital, clinical teams align new prescriptions with previous treatment plans through medical reconciliation.Although intended to be a safe process, almost one in three patients is subject to at least one medication error at admission or discharge.Current hospital systems do not adequately support collaborative work and instead of integrating into clinical workflows, they oftentimes require additional, potentially disruptive actions.The goal of my thesis is to explore how to build collaborative technologies for care transitions, illustrated by the example of medication management.I have conducted extensive field work in three different hospital environments, and identified how physicians repurpose distributed systems for informal communication or dealing with information overload.Building on these insights, my next step involves conducting participatory design workshops with care providers and evaluate how to successfully design tools that take into account this appropriation.This thesis aims to contribute to the understanding how to design collaborative technologies for safety critical environments.