Cognitive design of a digital desk for the emergency room setting

Digital desk technology has a still mainly unexplored potential to support the everyday work of collaborating clinicians. This paper presents ER Desk - a digital desk that was designed to specifically support a team of healthcare professionals working in an emergency room setting. The underlying design requirements were elicited in a comprehensive distributed cognition study of paper-based practices in an emergency room of a middle-sized Swedish hospital. We present the user interface and visualization requirements for digital desks for small clinical emergency room teams. Moreover, we discuss key design issues more generally with a focus on supporting team awareness, cognition, and collaborative routines of healthcare personnel working in clinical environments such as emergency rooms and intensive care units.