ProjectProposal-MichaelMai
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Contents |
Improved Emergency Room Triage
Introduction
When an emergency situation involving bodily harm occurs in daily life, most people go to the Emergency Room at the local general hospital. Upon entering the emergency waiting room, a nurse comes over to interview and assess the injured person before moving onto the next person in line. Everyone goes through this same process with the nurse. From the interviews with several people, the nurse must then go back to the counter and determine which people will go into the ER first and how long each person can wait. The process that the nurse handles is known as the ER triage.
Problem Description
When dealing with life-threatening ailments, the time of treatment is one of the major factors in saving a person's life. The current triage process has a few time inefficient steps that may lead to a loss of patient lives.
When a person walks into the ER, there is no patient/doctor interaction due to the sheer volume of emergency cases that the staff doctors must deal with. The role of gathering information is left to the nurses who must interview each and every person who comes in with a standard list of questions along with taking each person’s vital signs. The questions must be answered before the nurse can continue. With a standardized answer sheet, the nurse can efficiently cycle through the questions and record the answers quickly.
While recording the information in the intense environment of the ER, the nurse must determine the order of the people who enter the ER and see the doctors. While walking around the other patients, the nurse relays the critical information to the doctor(s) who oversee the treatment with only one copy of the information. In order to get more copies of information, someone would have to go to the copy machine, however, if the information was digitized, multiple copies may be printed out. As the nurse moves back and forth carrying the patient forms, more people stream into the emergency waiting room hoping to be treated.
Target User Group
The nurses and interviewers in most emergency waiting rooms will be the primary users of the new ER triage.
Needs
- Quick Relay of Information
- Accessible
- Manuverable
- Storage
- Legible
Wants
- Simple Technology
- Light
- Reusable
Although the nurses are the main user group who will physically use the technology, the patients and doctors will be the primary benefactors of the technology. The patients will be able to be interviewed continuously and quickly. The doctors, on the other hand, will be able to receive the vital information they need immediately so that they can start preparations for the next procedure.
Problem Context
Nurses require immediate answers to their questions in order to diagnosis the situation correctly. Asking the interview questions and recording the answers takes a fair amount of time. Many distracts can interrupt the nurse's concentration. Under the pressure of moving onto other patients, the nurse must make an immediate decision on the interviewee's treatment time. A rushed decision can lead to many complications.
Many patients are in a daze when they enter the loud and hectic emergency waiting room. In this confused state, the patient is asked to wait for a nurse before anything can happen. Due to impatience and pain, the patients may not be cooperative in answering questions. Also, some patients may see other patients that come in after them get admitted into the ER first. This perceived biasness may lead to agitation and resentment by both the patients and the nurses.
The sheer volume of entries along with several nurses working on interviews at the same time may cause problems for the processing of information by the network.
The general use of tablet PCs in general hospitals has been tested. However, in terms of bulkiness, the use of a tablet PC and stylus is unreasonable in the emergency waiting room. The nurse needs to remain highly mobile without the worry of breaking expensive equipment. Also, the use of a pen and paper require no additional training.
Solution
With the use of the Anoto pen and paper, the nurses will be able to minimize the time between recording the information and processing the information. By writing and checking the appropriate boxes on the paper, nurses will be able to quickly relay to the network which patients should be admitted directly into the ER right away.
Without the need to run the paper back to the counter for copying and processing, the nurse(s) will be able to help the patients in line as well as assist the new people who have just arrived. Without distracting the patients with new technology, the nurses will be able to help explain the ER procedures to more people.
As data is uploaded, the doctors who are coming out of their last treatment procedure will be able to start analyzing the situation of the next problem on their way back to the operating room or the emergency room. With multiple doctors, there will be more copies of the data available to all the doctors right away.
Sketch
Here's a sample image of the form on the Anoto paper:
Below is a key for the sketch showing which colors are which people:
An overview of the system can be found below:
