ClinicalVis: Supporting Clinical Task-Focused Design Evaluation

Abstract

Making decisions about what clinical tasks to prepare for is multi-factored, and especially challenging in intensive care environments where resources must be balanced with patient needs. Electronic health records (EHRs) are a rich data source, but are task-agnostic and can be difficult to use as summarizations of patient needs for a specific task, such as "could this patient need a ventilator tomorrow?" In this paper, we introduce ClinicalVis, an open-source EHR visualization-based prototype system for task-focused design evaluation of interactions between healthcare providers (HCPs) and EHRs. We situate ClinicalVis in a task-focused proof-of-concept design study targeting these interactions with real patient data. We conduct an empirical study of 14 HCPs, and discuss our findings on usability, accuracy, preference, and confidence in treatment decisions. We also present design implications that our findings suggest for future EHR interfaces, the presentation of clinical data for task-based planning, and evaluating task-focused HCP/EHR interactions in practice.