Capturing multimodal interaction at medical meetings in a hospital setting : Opportunities and Challenges

This paper highlights the issues involved in gathering a corpus of data on the multimodal interaction that occurs at a team meeting of medical specialists. Difficulties in capturing the data are described, and the ethical issues are emphasised. Methods to investigate the internal structure of meetings, at the level of discussion topic (patient case discussion) are summarised and the potential benefit that such meeting records promise are reviewed. The hospital setting where the corpora are proposed experience issues in common with any business venture, but in addition demonstrate additional sensitivities because of health service complexities and patient privacy issues. This paper discusses the issues involved in the recording, annotation and analysis of conversation among a group of hospital specialists at multidisciplinary medical team meetings (MDTMs). We report on progress so far in the automatic annotation and analysis of these multimodal corpora and the potential usefulness of our approach to information capture in MDTM settings. A teaching hospital setting has all the issues that one encounters in any workplace setting such as policies, procedures, culture, company business concerns and privacy, with additional requirements because of the fact that the collection is in healthcare. We see that corpus gathering in this situation is useful and important for three reasons. Firstly, as a research tool to improve our understanding of the role interactions, information sharing and collaboration in this type of work. Challenges encountered in a teaching hospital with regard to the multitude and complexity of specialist roles is normally greater than in most organisations. Through using a hospital forum to study collaborative work, the findings are likely to find application in a variety of other work settings. Secondly, we believe a meeting record in this setting would provide a useful artefact or co-ordinating mechanism for the co-operative work involved in patient care. By demonstrating its utility in this respect we expect that electronic meeting records will be eventually adopted. Finally, a meeting record would facilitate organizational level tasks such as audit and quality review for organizational development and learning. We expect that by integrating meeting records into existing data gathering methods in the hospital will prove more efficient than current practices of independent specialised data collection for a single audit question. Changing the methods for information monitoring and audit review has the potential to reshape organisations and enhance quality improvement initiatives in the long term. We summarise the main difficulties in achieving meeting corpora in business meeting scenarios, particularly in the health sector, and we also consider issues in conducting this type of research, i.e. different role perspectives, privacy constraints and ethics. The main goal of this paper is to identify the key issues that workplace researchers need to address, together with the issues specific to the healthcare service. We also discuss how these concerns can be addressed.