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Transforming clinic environments into information workspaces for patients

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Although clinic environments are a primary location for exchanging information with clinicians, patients experience these spaces as harsh environments to access, use, exchange, and manage information. In this paper, we present results from an ethnographic-inspired study of breast cancer patients actively interacting with information in clinic environments. Through observations and interviews, we observed information interactions in awkward physical positions; inefficient use of existing clinical space; separation of patients from their information and lack of support for collaborative document viewing. These factors compromised patients' abilities to manage their information work when they experienced bursts of information exchange, lack of advance information, fragmented attention, and heightened stress in clinic environments. To overcome these challenges, we identify formative strategies to focus attention, encourage collaboration, and improve communication in clinical settings.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2010
    2690 pages
    ISBN:9781605589299
    DOI:10.1145/1753326
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 10 April 2010

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    1. collaboration
    2. cscw
    3. medical informatics
    4. personal health informatics
    5. surface computing

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    • (2023)It Made Me Feel So Much More at Home Here: Patient Perspectives on Smart Home Technology Deployed at Scale in a Rehabilitation HospitalProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580757(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2021)Development of an Immersive Virtual Reality Learning Environment: Integrating Trauma-Informed Principles into Human Service Agency SettingsJournal of Technology in Human Services10.1080/15228835.2021.1915925(1-29)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2021
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