Transforming Clinic Environments into Information Workspaces for Patients.

Although clinic environments are a primary location for exchanging information with clinicians, patients experience these spaces as harsh environments to access, use, exchange, and manage information. In this paper, we present results from an ethnographic-inspired study of breast cancer patients actively interacting with information in clinic environments. Through observations and interviews, we observed information interactions in awkward physical positions; inefficient use of existing clinical space; separation of patients from their information and lack of support for collaborative document viewing. These factors compromised patients' abilities to manage their information work when they experienced bursts of information exchange, lack of advance information, fragmented attention, and heightened stress in clinic environments. To overcome these challenges, we identify formative strategies to focus attention, encourage collaboration, and improve communication in clinical settings.

Bringing the Field into Focus: User-centered Design of a Patient Expertise Locator.

Managing personal aspects of health is challenging for many patients, particularly those facing a serious condition such as cancer. Finding experienced patients, who can share their knowledge from managing a similar health situation, is of tremendous value. Users of health-related social software form a large base of such knowledge, yet these tools often lack features needed to locate peers with expertise. Informed directly by our field work with breast cancer patients, we designed a patient expertise locator for users of online health communities. Using feedback from two focus groups with breast cancer survivors, we took our design through two iterations. Focus groups concluded that expertise locating features proved useful for extending social software. They guided design enhancements by suggesting granular user control through (1) multiple mechanisms to identify expertise, (2) detailed user profiles to select expertise, and (3) varied collaboration levels. Our user-centered approach links field work to design through close collaboration with patients. By illustrating trade-offs made when sharing sensitive health information, our findings inform the incorporation of expertise locating features into social software for patients.