Handoff Management: Theory and Practice

In Phase I of the project we developed a theory that can be used to identify the key information that should be conveyed in a handoff situation.  We have also been developing an approach where the theory can be used to determine the value of specific nuggets of information in a handoff situation.  The theory is domain independent, and is potentially relevant for a spectrum of applications.   We have two primary goals in this phase II project. First, we will extend and refine the core theory in ways that will make it more practical to utilize for real applications. Second, we plan to operationalize the approach - building an implementation that will enable us to identify the salient features of a transition.  We plan to apply this framework in two different ways. One application will focus on the evaluation of knowledge management tools. Specifically, such tools can be evaluated with respect to how well they can represent the salient information related to a handoff, and how well the support the communication of this information.  The second application will identify and tag documents that are most likely to be relevant for handoffs, based on the projected needs of users executing tasks.  Both applications will be evaluated in two domains – a medical domain and a data science domain.