Supporting Collaborative Health Tracking in the Hospital: Patients' Perspectives.

The hospital setting creates a high-stakes environment where patients' lives depend on accurate tracking of health data. Despite recent work emphasizing the importance of patients' engagement in their own health care, less is known about how patients track their health and care in the hospital. Through interviews and design probes, we investigated hospitalized patients' tracking activity and analyzed our results using the stage-based personal informatics model. We used this model to understand how to support the tracking needs of hospitalized patients at each stage. In this paper, we discuss hospitalized patients' needs for collaboratively tracking their health with their care team. We suggest future extensions of the stage-based model to accommodate collaborative tracking situations, such as hospitals, where data is collected, analyzed, and acted on by multiple people. Our findings uncover new directions for HCI research and highlight ways to support patients in tracking their care and improving patient safety.

"Scared to go to the Hospital": Inpatient Experiences with Undesirable Events.

Involving patients in healthcare safety practices has long been an area of priority and importance. However, we still need to understand how patients perceive undesirable events during their hospital stay, and what role patients play in the prevention of these events. To address this gap, we surveyed pediatric inpatients and caregivers to understand their perspectives on undesirable events. By giving them an opportunity to use their own words to describe their experiences, we found a diverse array of undesirable events. Our qualitative analysis revealed four major types of events that patients and caregivers experienced: mismanagement, communication, policy, and lack of care coordination. We also examined the information needs that patients and caregivers experienced during these situations, and learned how they would prefer to receive this information. Based on these results, we provide recommendations for inpatient technologies that could enable patients to identify and prevent such undesirable events.