Towards a pattern language approach to sharing experiences in healthcare technology evaluations

Healthcare technologies are becoming increasingly pervasive, moving from controlled clinical and laboratory settings, to real environments such as homes, acute care environments and residential care centres. As a consequence, new challenges arise in evaluating the impact of healthcare technologies and interactions in their context of use. In this paper we propose the use of a pattern language as a means of capturing experiences from researchers in the field of evaluating healthcare technologies. The potential benefits of such an approach include the availability of a centralised repository, or collaborative tool of past experiences which can contribute to the reuse of knowledge, which can encourage and improve communication between interdisciplinary members of the healthcare community and which is presented in a ‘lay’ language, understandable by all. We propose to structure the content of our pattern language along three stages of healthcare, namely home care, residential care and acute care and to organise evaluations across each of these stages in terms of physical, social, intellectual and purpose fitness.