Assessing, computing and providing quality of care information to multiple users: The nursing home industry in the U.S.

In today's information age, a critical challenge is to provide the right information in the appropriate form to the proper user at the right time. While enormous quantities of data are routinely being collected, stored and made available, "engineering" useful, usable and timely information offers specific difficult design issues for the Human-Computer Interaction field to address and resolve. The problem is even more complex when the same underlying data needs to be engineered in potentially different ways and provided to multiple users with different needs. In this paper, we present one such challenge: designing a global system to inform many different types of users over time about quality of care delivered in nursing facilities throughout the United States. Specifically, we describe the work currently under progress and derive important observations for the research and development community.