Managing Patient Health Across Diverse Spaces: Using Activity Theory to Model Pervasive Decision Support

Abstract

Clinical decision support (CDS) systems can offer health care providers and patient data that is intelligently filtered and presented in ways to enhance diagnosis and long-term health care management, both within and outside clinical spaces. Challenges to this information management include diagnostic error and inefficiencies from conflicting, incomplete, or suboptimal clinical systems [3] as well as extending care outside the traditional clinical environment. We propose a Clinical Activity Model (CAM) to understand pervasive CDS system design and use across multiple health care spaces as patients move between critical care, recovery, and long-term home care. We discuss CAM in the context of research findings comparing a novel CDS system with traditional modes of data delivery and by describing use of that system as a mobile diagnostic tool to bridge clinical care and home care.