PLACO: a cooperative architecture for solving coordination problem in health care

Task sharing often implies many deviations which disturb the normal course of the functioning of medical units, especially intensive care units (ICUs). The objective of our research is to study software architectures allowing task coordination and managing conflicts between participants within a distributed environment. This paper emphasizes our approach to cooperative work. We describe a workflow model for supporting group work in the critical care environment (CCE). We apply the model to ICUs through the analysis and proposal of a new architecture called PLACO ("PLAnification COoperative", i.e. cooperative planning).