Exploring Collaboration Breakdowns Between Provider Teams and Patients in Post-Surgery Care

An illustration of how multi-stakeholders collaborate during the post-surgical care transition process. Through interviews with 13 care providers and four patients, we identified coordination and communication breakdowns between in-patient and out-patient care provider teams, and between patients and providers, which create challenges for patients to prepare self-management of care at home and can lead to a delay in care support.
Abstract
Post-surgery care involves ongoing collaboration between provider teams and patients, which starts from post-surgery hospitalization through home recovery after discharge. While prior HCI research has primarily examined patients’ challenges at home, less is known about how provider teams coordinate discharge preparation and care handoffs, and how breakdowns in communication and care pathways may affect patient recovery. To investigate this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 healthcare providers and 4 patients in the context of gastrointestinal (GI) surgery. We found coordination boundaries between in- and out-patient teams, coupled with complex organizational structures within teams, impeded the “invisible work” of preparing patients’ home care plans and triaging patient information. For patients, these breakdowns resulted in inadequate preparation for home transition and fragmented self-collected data, both of which undermine timely clinical decision-making. Based on these findings, we outline design opportunities to formalize task ownership and handoffs, contextualize co-temporal signals, and align care plans with home resources.
Materials
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Authors
Bingsheng Yao
Menglin Zhao
Zhan Zhang
Pengqi Wang
Emma G. Chester
Changchang Yin
Tianshi Li
Varun Mishra
Odysseas P. Chatzipanagiotou
Timothy Pawlik
Ping Zhang
Weidan Cao
Dakuo Wang
Citation
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Exploring Collaboration Breakdowns Between Provider Teams and Patients in Post-Surgery Care

Bingsheng Yao, Menglin Zhao, Zhan Zhang, Pengqi Wang, Emma G. Chester, Changchang Yin, Tianshi Li, Varun Mishra, Lace M. Padilla, Odysseas P. Chatzipanagiotou, Timothy Pawlik, Ping Zhang, Weidan Cao, and Dakuo Wang. Proc. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems—CHI. 2026. DOI: 10.1145/3772318.3791960

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