Category Archives: Clinical Information System

Clinical UI Design Sprint – Self Challenge

Starting Some Design Sprints

I have decided to start putting into my schedule more “design sprints” as a way of flexing my UI/Ux design muscles in prep for future work.
I came from a UI design background, so I am getting back to some roots through this activity.

Like any good project, I have defined some constraints for a sprint. Here are my constraints:

  1. I have one week for a sprint with a topic of interest to me (does not have to relate to a project).
  2. I must complete 1 pomodoro sprint daily (if you do not know those, they are essentially a 25 minute block of focused effort followed by a rest)
  3. I must complete 10 pomodoros through a work week (Monday to Friday)
  4. I will document my work.
  5. I ship the design on the weekend.

I am focusing on healthcare IT design considerations, such as portions of the EMR and personal health services.

I will use methods that I can do myself, so I do not have to coordinate ethics, users, etc. This is meant to encourage with as few barriers as possible and, let’s be honest, waiting for recruitment for a focus group is not a pomodoro.

Methods I am using include

  1. Simple web research
  2. Mood boards
  3. Personas
  4. Activity modeling
  5. Use Case Mapping
  6. Wireframing / Prototyping

I have picked these because they will fit into pomodoros and they have a visual component so they might be interesting to share online.

Anyone is welcome to join me on a sprint.

My first attempt was a sprint on the problem list in EMRs and I documented the work in a little video.

It was interesting and good to do. I will be making more space to do these in the coming months as I find them recharging.

Hazard analysis for Safety-critical Information Systems

There is a notable lack of maturity of prospective hazard analysis methodology for safety-critical information systems (such as clinical information systems). Most methods in this area target only the user interface and are limited to usability studies. We have been researching hazard analysis methods to fill this important gap and defined the ISHA (Information System Hazard Analysis) method, based on earlier foundational work in safety engineering. Today, Fieran Mason-Blakely is presenting our paper at FHIES/SEHC 2014. In this paper, we apply ISHA to the EMR-to-EMR episodical document exchange (E2E) standard developed in British Columbia (which is currently under deployment). Check out our paper for details.

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