A web application for supporting health care tasks with a groupware planning approach

Abstract

Hospital emergency wards such as Gynaecology and obstetrics maternities are extremely complex to manage and pose serious health risks to patients. Related tasks which are mainly focused around patient management are basically achieved through a cooperative way that involves several health care professionals. Such team members with separate skills and roles should work together during patients' management. In this paper, we firstly discuss our study of work in-situ within an Algerian maternity ward to better understand the usual way under which tasks are effectively achieved and identify the artefacts used. Such observation allowed us to highlight vital collaborative medical tasks that need to be designed. The following sections outline basic design concepts of our collaborative planning system, which is designed to provide a flexible group interaction support for care coordination and continuity.