When Lives Are at Stake

This thin-client software is for capturing patient data in the emergency room. We built the software in a .NET environment. I helped select the components to integrate for tables and other data elements, reducing the time required to get our solution fully functional.

Horizon Emergency Care - Charting

Horizon Emergency Care - Charting

The Charting Module lets care providers add documentation to their patients' charts. It's crucial to track diagnoses in a way that others can understand, and electronic charting has many benefits over paper charting. For example, the information might be hard to read if a hurried doctor writes it on paper, and paper is harder to share across multiple floors of the hospital.

Horizon Emergency Care - Enter Orders

Horizon Emergency Care - Enter Orders

Doctors and nurses enter orders when they want procedures or tests to be done, or medications to be assigned to the patient. It is crucial to have these orders tracked accurately. The order entry module helps tremendously with this part of patient care.

Horizon Emergency Care - Manage Orders

Horizon Emergency Care - Manage Orders

Managing the administration of orders after they have been entered is how the emergency department staff keeps track of what has been done. Design research also revealed the fact that some orders have some associated tasks, which must also be tracked. For example, a blood test is done in a lab, but it requires a phlebotomist to actually draw the blood sample.

After establishing the new interaction design for the modules above, we had a chance to look ahead and imagine what we could do to improve the physician charting process. My first recommendation was to eliminate the old process of bringing up multiple windows when entering details about a body system, allowing the person to stay within the same screen for all options. A discussion of that project can be found on this page.

A sample dynamic prototype used to test new "task management" functionality may be found here.

More before/after shots available in this PowerPoint presentation.

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