Health: Keeping The Clinician And The Patient At The Centre Of ICT Development
As my work is to be intrigued by and help craft man-machine interfaces, on the occasional visit to hospital appointments, I often peer over the practitioner’s shoulder to look at whatever they’re using to capture my data. Sometimes it’s uneventful. But at others, it has seemed that the practitioner is struggling to make head or tail of the interface. You can observe their “pogo-sticking” from one screen to another, trying to remember the commands and gestures to navigate, something that to some extent is unavoidable while trying to keep up the important practitioner-to-patient face-time. And, at other times the practitioner will go as far as committing, seeing my intrigue, that their experience with the systems they are using is challenging. It is, they sometimes say, as if the design was arrived at without consideration of their everyday experience, whether they be doctor, or nurse or another clinician. That thought seems to lead to a mild but manageable ongoing discomfort in having to “put up with the system” and to have to adapt to it when perhaps the system ought to be adapted to them. It goes beyond a rudimentary opportunity to complain. We’ve all been there – “Computer says ‘No’”, and we wish it would say no all the way to the dumpster.
Of course, it is easy to criticise technology and to forget the gains that we’ve made along the way. We’ve seen digital systems go through an evolution from blue and black screen command-line interfaces to GUIs (think Windows XP platform software) influenced by the available technology and the motivation to better manage data-handling. A friend and colleague of mine worked at BAE (British Aerospace) in the UK programming punch cards where the digital interface was a tangible one, handled like precious metals and kept in air-tight rooms. Along the way systems design, often at the scale required for hospitals and other medical services, has at times not considered that the user – the practitioner – will be at the helm of the system. This absence isn’t something symptomatic of Healthcare systems – there is a similar diagnosis for Enterprise and Business Systems across other sectors.
How the user features in the design process has moved on significantly now. There are simple techniques, useful even for the most complex of systems, that can be employed to ensure recognition of the end-user along with business-outcomes. Part of a user experience strategy is the balance of these often apparently conflicting perspectives. How software and digital services look on the other side of Healthcare’s glass-door in more commercially-orientated industries is an approach that is hopefully of increasing importance in the field of Healthcare software services. Over the next few months in a series of short articles, we will touch on some subjects that can better empower Product Owners in Healthcare, especially those dealing with fewer resources or open-source software, towards thinking about the issues and opportunities that can usher their products towards easy acceptance and seamless use.
Most sectors face a similar set of problems whether they are commercially-orientated or social in context. The challenge is how best to employ the tools and approaches available to build better man-machine interfaces that at their best delight their audiences as well as efficiently manage the data for good outcomes. A facet of that for Healthcare is how to help keep those who are perplexed by their digital support systems less so and free to concentrate on pursuing innovation and delivering the quality of care that can do what we all want – help folks get better.