Prototype design and evaluation of a computer supported system for multidiscipline meetings in a primary healthcare center Cecilia Saint-Pierre Departamento de Ciencia de la Computación P. U. Católica de Chile csaintpierre@uc.cl Esteban Piñones Departamento de Ciencia de la Computación P. U. Católica de Chile enpinone@uc.cl Matías Rojas Departamento de Ciencia de la Computación P. U. Católica de Chile mirojas1@uc.cl Valeria Herskovic Departamento de Ciencia de la Computación P. U. Católica de Chile vherskov@ing.puc.cl ABSTRACT Primary health care centers in the Chilean public system implement a family healthcare model with collaboration of several professional disciplines. This collaboration is often through multidisciplinary case analysis meetings, but it has a high cost for each treated case. In order to understand how collaboration is done and how technology supports it, we conducted a study in a healthcare center in Maipú, Chile. We found several problems regarding collaboration: a lack of awareness of the case status and the activities held by each of the professionals, and that the standard Electronic Medical Records System was not able to capture information about collaboration instances, making the awareness more difficult. To solve this, we propose a web-based system that allows the team to visualize the case status and track the cases in just one screen. We evaluated the relevance of this proposal through interviews with team leaders, who had positive opinions about it. Although our study has limitations, we conclude that the main requirements for collaboration in this context are the awareness that must exist about the activities of other team professionals and the possibility to see them at a glance. Future work will implement the proposal for an evaluation with a large number of users. Keywords Computer supported collaborative work (CSCW), collaborative systems, primary healthcare centers, multidisciplinary healthcare teams. 1. INTRODUCTION The family health model is considered the cornerstone of health care in Chile [1]. The reform initiated at the beginning of this decade in Chile seeks to implement this model in Primary Health Care (PHC). In order to improve the quality of life of the Chilean population, the Ministry of Health is hoping to use comprehensive care and increase their problem-solving model based on family 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 Permissions@acm.org. ChileCHI '13, November 11 - 15 2013, Temuco, Chile Copyright 2013 ACM 978-1-4503- 2200-3/13/11 $15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2535597.2535599 community and health by positioning the PHC as the center of the public system [2]. Currently, the health care model implemented in PHC dates back to 2004 [3]. The implemented health care model has eight essential components that implicitly show the collaboration of a healthcare team serving each family. This model is not explicit on how to make multidisciplinary teams collaborate in order to meet the objectives. Thus, each center has implemented different mechanisms for collaboration. One of the mechanisms used for teamwork is to hold meetings of medical case analysis in which professionals from different disciplines generate an intervention plan for the patient, their family and his environment. This helps to solve medical and environmental problems that impact the health of a family group. There are many advocates of this methodology and the literature presents the benefits of collaboration between different disciplines to care for complex cases, but these meetings have disadvantages such as that they require a lot of time from the professionals for a single case. This can be considered inefficient and is at the expense of other patients at the health center. Our research was carried out at Ahués Family Health Center, where we found that collaboration between healthcare professionals is developed in three instances: first, an informal instance with professionals asking the opinion of coworkers, even at the cost of interrupting their work. Second, workers must attend a weekly meeting. Third, they have regular meetings to analyze complex cases. In the meetings, a group of professionals analyze the history of a case and design an intervention plan that considers 3 dimensions: individual, family and community, and details the activities, the professional responsible for each activity and a time limit in order to solve the problem. The professionals also have a shared information system that stores information about the calendar, medical history, vaccines, food distribution and medicine. Our work is a first approach towards studying how professionals collaborate in this context and how this collaboration can be improved or enhanced with the support of information technology to obtain benefits in favor of patient care. This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents a review of the literature aimed to support collaboration in multidisciplinary meetings and maintain coordination of activities of various disciplines on the same case. Section 3 explains the methodology used in our study and the obtained results at each stage of its development. Section 4 5