Good-Enough Awareness: Patient and Caregiver Perspectives on Care Workflow Visibility in Single-Patient Room

Patients often experience hospitalization as dis-empowering, with little awareness of the workflows that coordinate their care. The transition to single-bed patient rooms further heightens information asymmetries by removing the ambient and informal cues that multi-bed rooms once provided. We conducted design-oriented online focus groups with diverse patient types, as well as in-hospital interviews with patients and their caregivers, to examine what care workflow data representations they find meaningful for maintaining awareness of the care work performed by healthcare workers (HCWs), such as nurses and healthcare assistants. Our findings suggest that even minimal, non-intrusive data, such as an HCW’s last visit, when a porter is scheduled to arrive, or approximately when a doctor is expected, can enhance patients’ preparedness, create space for rest, and restore agency. This paper makes two contributions: 1) we provide empirical insights into what types of data about care workflows patients and caregivers find meaningful for supporting awareness of care workflows in single-patient hospital rooms; and 2) we empirically show how the CSCW concept of mutual awareness also encompasses affective dimensions, illustrating how awareness technologies may foster patients’ autonomy, agency, and well-being.