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Designing Clinically Useful Systems: Examples from Medicine and Dentistry

Department of Medical Sciences, Medical Informatics and Engineering, Uppsala University, University Hospital, 82:1, SE-751 85 Uppsala, Sweden; sabine.koch{at}medsci.uu.se

Despite promising results in medical informatics research and the development of a large number of different systems, few systems get beyond a prototype state and are really used in practice. Among other factors, the lack of explicit user focus is one main reason.

The research projects presented in this paper follow a user-centered system development approach based on extensive work analyses in interdisciplinary working groups, taking into account human cognitive performance. Different medical and health-care specialists, together with researchers in human-computer interaction and medical informatics, specify future clinical work scenarios. Special focus is put on analysis and design of the information and communication flow and on exploration of intuitive visualization and interaction techniques for clinical information. Adequate choice of the technical access device is made depending on the user’s work situation. It is the purpose of this paper to apply this method in two different research projects and thereby to show its potential for designing clinically useful systems that do support and not hamper clinical work. These research projects cover IT support for chairside work in dentistry (http://www.dis.uu.se/mdi/research/projects/orquest) and ICT support for home health care of elderly citizens (http://www.medsci.uu.se/mie/project/closecare).

KEY WORDS: Dental informatics • home health care • human-computer interaction • medical informatics