Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Everyware Health Care: Mobile Patient Communicator- an interactive touch screen for patient education
Via the Cloud Computing Journal:
New Mobile Patient Communicator Gives Patients and Interactive Education Tool and Boosts Nurse Productivity
"“Nurses spend a lot of time simply escorting patients from the waiting room to the exam room. We have found that the MPC can effectively room patients, while creating more value-added time for nurses to assume additional clinical tasks,” said Kelvin Buncum, president of International Medical Solutions. "
"“A compelling attribute of the MPC is that it increases nurse and support staff productivity, since it frees up caregivers to devote more of their valuable time to patient evaluations,” noted Buncum, who with his partner Jaime Mitchell, developed the MPC in conjunction with a family practice physician who saw the need to improve his medical support staff‟s productivity to meet growing demand and patients‟ knowledge of their chronic disease."
"During their wait time patients can view educational videos in private to learn about critical matters involving their acute illness, chronic condition and procedures. The user-friendly MPC delivers subject matter specific to the patient‟s stage of care, treatment regimen, rehabilitation, care plan and disease management."
"Serving as a personal health tutor and trainer, the MPC can perform pre- and post-instruction tests, scoring patients on their disease knowledge and retention. Healthcare providers can also grant users access to their clinical Web portal and patient applications via the MPC, providing significant utility over stationary kiosks."
The International Medical Solutions company offers a selection of touch-screen mobile patient communicator devices that would have come in handy during my father's longer-than-expected stay in an intensive care unit:
7 Inch MPC
10-Inch MPC
12 Inch MPC
11-inch Rugged MPC
Applications:
Whitepaper (pdf)
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
World Usability Day's Healthcare Focus: Thoughts about health care user-experience design...
The theme of the 2007 World Usability Day is healthcare. This event aims to create awareness about the need for user-centered design within the health care system. Here is some information posted on UPA's World Usability Community blog:
"..."The importance of user-centered design in healthcare is truly about life and death” noted Elizabeth Rosenzweig, Founder and Director of World Usability Day. “Whether it’s new medical devices or technologies; drug research, approval or delivery; patient forms or medical record sharing; emergency disaster planning or increasing the functionality of hospitals and everyday healthcare delivery, everyone is effected in some way by the intersection of usability and healthcare. There are many commonalities, yet each region of the world faces its own set of unique challenges. We believe that focusing World Usability Day 2007 on healthcare will create a stronger awareness of these issues and lead to initiatives that have long term impact on the quality of everyone’s life".
Information about World Usability Day:
www.worldusabilityday.org.
Usability and interaction with the health care system has become a personal interest of mine, as I've spent the better part of the past month assisting a close relative negotiate three hospital stays, a couple of surgeries, numerous medical tests, and visits to various medical professionals. This has been an eye-opening experience, as anyone who has followed a similar path would agree.
I propose that efforts to improve usability should consider using some of the strategies employed by user-experience designers, taking into consideration that the definition of "user" includes the patient/consumer, the patient's family and social support network, health care professionals, hospital and medical staff, health educators, researchers, and so forth.
When I have the chance, I'll post some of my observations and thoughts related to this topic.
