CASMAS-WOAD to Achieve Integrated Care and Coordination among Heterogeneous Care Communities

Abstract

The highly distributed cooperation that characterizes several domain, like healthcare, collaborative design and cultural resources management, often raise coordination conflicts and collaborative problems. These problems require a suitable technological support that can make the members of the groups involved in these collaborative practices aware of the crucial information that is generated in the other groups. In this paper, we propose a framework for the design of such technological supports and illustrate its application by means of an articulated healthcare scenario. Our framework allows users to: manage the creation and execution of rules that are specific and “local” to specific groups; manage the exchange of rules, and hence of “procedural knowledge”, across and among different groups; conceive predefined procedures that are considered as “carriers” of contextual information rather than models of prescriptive behavior; become mutually aware of interdependent task articulation as a basic support of inter-group collaboration; get facilitated access to the relevant information that supports their collaborative activities.