We worked with Palomar Medical Center to create interaction design system for a new service that that can improve communication between healthcare staff in a hospital environment.
Current Situation
In healthcare, the number of providers that may be involved in patient-care at any one point in time could range between 7 and 20. In an environment where errors come with a proportionally higher consequence, effective communication is a necessity in order for patients to be adequately cared for.
The lack of a mediator in asynchronous communication seems to be the root cause of the
problem.
What is the problem we are trying to solve?
Our problem space analysis finds that the current methods of communication (both synchronous and asynchronous) and the lack of consistency in delivering patient results between caregivers creates breakdowns that prevent efficient and timely information transfer to take place. The result is a very unstable and unreliable information transmission system.
INNOVATION
Based on ethnographic research, hospital workflow studies, and thousands of conversations with healthcare professionals Palomar Medical Center, we concluded that nurses and doctors in clinical settings need a new type of system designed specifically to accommodate their high-pressure environment and interrupt-driven workflows.
Methodology
The process of Stakeholder Identification involved finding various stakeholders to interact with during the course of the study. The identification was based on recommendations by hospital administrators and in some cases, studying org charts of the department to identify a minimum set of people and then following the processes to identify other stakeholders.
Work flow and Cross-departmental analysis
The process flow study involved an in-depth look at the inner workings of the departments within the hospital, and understanding the various steps involved in their respective event generation and notification process. A cross departmental study was done to determine if there were any significant differences in the notification process flow in or between departments that generate events.
In User Task Modeling, the objective is to examine the various roles within the hospital and understand the specific tasks each role performs. A closer inspection of the roles may reveal the ways in which tasks may overlap or intertwine, and when tasks are confined to the roles of that one individual.
Use Cases
We created scenarios that are close to what happens at a hospital under various circumstances to validate our findings with the healthcare professionals and get their feedback.
Usage Scenarios
Story boarding and visualization was made to explain the problem and our proposed solution to the actual users of the system (nurses/ physicians/lab staff), as the models do not make any sense to them.
Validated Scenarios with Stakeholders at PPH
