Supporting enhanced collaboration in distributed multidisciplinary care team meetings

Abstract

This paper describes an initiative for exploring the design space of an enhanced collaboration platform for a multidisciplinary breast cancer team meeting distributed between two hospitals. We present our socio-technical approach to the system design process which is intended to encourage engagement between the research technologists and the clinicians without adversely affecting the work of the clinicians. We report on some initial results of the observational study performed by the Braccetto research team and current social-technical issues affecting communication between the multidisciplinary team members during the meetings. We highlight some technical and research challenges which include the role that medical images play as "boundary objects" for several disciplines in the meeting, the awareness requirement and the evaluation of collaboration effectiveness.