Collaboration in-between: The Care Hotel and Designing for Flexible Use

In this paper, we analyse the challenges of working between organizations and established information infrastructures. The Care Hotel is a municipal healthcare facility where persons, typically following a hospital stay, undergo rehabilitation to enable them to live independently at home. Admission, stay, and discharge from the Care Hotel entail numerous coordination activities with a variety of frequent and sporadic, heterogeneous, external collaborators, including general practitioners, relatives, and hospitals, some of which are already part of large information infrastructures, whereas others are too small or shifting to allow for stable arrangements. Hence, work at the Care Hotel may be characterized as ‘collaboration in-between’. We propose a design solution for flexible use to further stimulate reflection on design implications, and how to meet the challenges of collaboration in-between. As large infrastructures continue to develop, we posit that many ‘in-between settings’ will encounter similar challenges to collaboration. Healthcare providers in contexts of fragmented healthcare are also likely to face such challenges.