Health Information Technology denotes an enormous potential to improve health care cost effectiveness and quality of care. However, health information technology has been failing to demonstrate its foreseen benefits, and its involvement in the care process is limited to specific fields. Several disadvantages of health information technologies have been reported. Partly due to the autonomy of most clinical departments, few health care processes have been modelled comprehensively enough to provide a basis for specifying software requirements to health information technology designers. Alternatively, health information technology designers have focused on supporting the work of individual care team members by taking existing paperbased tools, as their models. The result is that most health information technology does little for process support. Health information technology usability, and adoption in daily practice is closely related to the systems’ semantic and technological interoperability. The trend in the health information technology field has been to push as much information as possible to the users, with a view to finding a solution. In this paper is discussed how the context-aware methodology can contribute as a solution to this problem, by enabling process support.
context-awareness, healthcare, workflow, information technology, process support.
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