Infrastructuring Multicultural Healthcare Information Systems

This paper stresses the need for more research in the field of Participatory
Design (PD) and in particular into how to design Health Information Technology
(HIT) together with care providers and -receivers in multicultural settings.
We contribute to this research by describing a case study, the ‘Health-Cultures’
project, in which we designed HIT for the context of home care of older people
with a migration background. The Health-Cultures project is located in the city of
Genk, Belgium, which is known for its multicultural population, formed by three
historical migration waves of people coming to work in the nowadays closed coal
mines. Via a PD approach, we studied existing means of dialogue and designed
HIT that both care receivers and care providers in Genk can use in their daily exchanges between cultures in home care contexts. In discussing relevant literature as well as the results of this study, we point to the need and the ways of taking spatio-historical aspects of a specific healthcare situation into account in the PD of HIT to support multicultural perspectives on healthcare.