(Intensive Care Unit)

Group Members

In the chaotic emergency care environment, patients are being admitted haphazardly and staff members must make snap judgement about patient treatment. Doctors, nurses and other members of the hospital staff need an efficient way to keep track of patients coming into and going out of the medical care units. They also need to keep track of patient medical status, interventions performed, and note which members of the staff are responsible for which patients. A common medium for information management in this fast-paced environment is a simple marker and white board, which doctors and nurses share to keep track of this large and complex network of information.
While the whiteboard does score high on the efficiency and learnability scale, it is a dismally unsafe and prone to all kinds of error including lapses, mistakes, poor form, smudging, etc. For an institution who's goal it is to provide care, the dismal safety score of the whiteboard merits a revamped user interface design.
Several institutions employ existing medical information management platforms, but clinical staff often describe these tools as "cumbersome", "inefficient" and "annoying", and often simply use the whiteboards instead.