Virtual Intensive Care Units:

Building and maintaining simultaneous dynamic relationships in a virtual organization


Healthcare work, and in particular work in ICUs, is inherently collaborative. Collaboration improves when people are actively aware of the activities around them. This sense of ‘awareness’ or ‘the understanding of the activities of others which provide a context for your own activity’ (Dourish & Belotti, 1992) is important to consider when implementing any form of information technology in healthcare (Pratt, Reddy, McDonald, Tarczy-Hornoch, & Gennari, 2004). Successful collaboration requires that individuals share information with each other, in particular about their own activities; collaboration contributes to increasing awareness. How do virtual ICU nurses develop awareness about what is happening in multiple ICUs?

Funding for the research project is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF 08-550, "Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems (VOSS)" Program)

The research project is conducted by the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement (CQPI) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison