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

Clinical decision support (CDS) systems can offer health care providers 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 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.