An asynchronous co-operative model for co-ordinating medical unit activities.

CSCW is devoted to the analysis of interactions among human beings when performing their work together (Ellis et al., Commun. ACM 1 (34) (1991) 38-58). The main fields of application are work organisation, healthcare, education and training. Our main goal is to study the co-operative models allowing task co-ordination and conflict management between actors within a distributed environment, particularly in medical units. We do not aim to produce a practical system suitable for near-term deployment in the intensive care units (ICU), but rather an experimental system that performs and co-ordinates a range of intelligent planning tasks in ICU activities. The emphasis will be put especially on asynchronous co-operation. We apply the Workflow approach to ICU organisation through the analysis and the proposal of a co-operative model.