ContextMorph: A Model of Context-Aware Cross-Boundary Decision Support in E-Health

Abstract

Advances in information technology have generated remarkable shifts in the way people share information and harness peer opinion across geographical boundaries for better decision-making. However, leveraging this development for cross-boundary clinical decision support in e-health poses a significant challenge. This is because information sharing in healthcare is more than simple transfer of information. It is realized within a complex structure of clinical work practices, including problem-based conversational encounters about a clinical situation, shared perceptions of the information, and practice-driven appraisal of evidence and peer opinion that vary across geographical and workplace boundaries. This paper proposes the concept of ContextMorph as a technique for adaptively transforming information across the work boundaries of an e-health environment to suit a user's local work context, problem requirements and clinical work practices. We describe the conceptual architecture of, and our approach to formalizing, ContextMorph.