ProjectProposal-VaheOughourlianold
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Problem Description
The problem at hand is the antiquated and disjoint service we see in our local hospitals, particularly in emergency situations, in regards to patient records; for example, record keeping, record recall, or alerting of appropriate departments (such as for blood tests) for services. Often only one paper record of a patient's information is created when the patient is admitted for treatment. This creates a problem for the dissemination of this information among the various departments (and various doctors and nurses) of the hospital working on a single patient. The nurse may take the record back to her station for transcription. The folder may be misplaced underneath another. The clipboard may fall to the floor and get kicked underneath a cabinet. In all these situations, a digital extra would be immediately avaialble on the computer. Also, it may be unclear as to who ordered which treatment option when, as different doctors who may be working on the same patient may prescribe different medicines, whereas a digital representation would carry an ID and timestamp with it. If a doctor or nurse wishes to get the immediate opinion of another medical professional in another part of the building, or in another medical facility altogether, he or she must wait until the medical records can be faxed over, or must rely on the incomplete verbal relay of information over a voice link, as opposed to a digital copy of the record itself.
Target User Group
The target user group is the community of medical professionals, which includes doctors, nurses, emergency medical technicians, all of whom may have varying levels of computer expertise but are almost certainly familiar with the use of pen and paper. They should, to a novice to intermediate degree, be familiar with interation with digital devices such as a computer, and at least be adequate in the use of a mouse and keyboard and some typical software, such as Microsoft Word. This group will require a quick, easy to use, reliable input system mimicing their most common tools for record keeping (i.e. - pen and paper with clerical input to a computer). This system must also be highly portable and be implementable with a minimum of training time and large, immobile additions to already existing hardware.
Problem Context
test
Solution Sketch
test
