Peri-operative Coordination and Communication Systems: A Case of CSCW in Medical Informatics

Medical Informatics has traditionally been concerned with optimizing the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine. These systems have hence often payed little attention to supporting the collaborative nature of most medical work. In this position paper, we want to introduce our ongoing work on CSCW research in a healthcare context. Particularly, we want to present the design, implementation, and use of a new class of systems for use in hospitals. We call these systems for ‘Peri-operative Coordination and Communication Systems’ or PoCCS for short. By using computing technology not only for information retrieval and storage but for coordination and communication purposes, we show that work efficiency and quality in a hospital can be significantly improved. ACM Classification