A Helpful Framework for the Organization of the Homecare

We present our contribution to a national project whose ambition is to use new cooperation tools, in the context of homecare, in order to facilitate the coordinated cooperative work of health actors. Homecare is expected to develop in the coming years, but it is still difficult to organize and such care coordination is complex. A study of homecare activity leads us to determine two specific sorts of activity : one concerns the implementation of human and material resources and design of the homecare protocol, and the other concerns the actual coordinated patient care. In this paper we focus on the needs which we have encountered in such a context : a workflow coordination is useful if the care is well protocoled, human decision is crucial in more unusual situations. We propose a model of coordination which is based on the three following concepts : recursive description of action, flexible routing, common share of reference. A prototype is implanted and used to refine the description of the homecare activity.