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. © 2013 ACM.