Cognitive Maps to Visualise Clinical Cases in Handovers. Design, Implementation, Usability, and Attractiveness...

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Clinical handovers are cognitively demanding due to time constraints and information intensity.
• Current checklist-based handover tools do not meet user requirements for presenting complex clinical information.
• Existing methods often fail to provide an intuitive overview of patient cases.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel concept for visualising clinical case overviews as an alternative to checklist formats.
• To implement this visualisation concept within an electronic health record (EHR) system for clinical handovers.
• To evaluate the usability and attractiveness of the developed visualisation tool among clinicians.

Main Methods:

• Developed a concept based on cognitive maps and Gestalt principles for pictorial case overviews.
• Integrated the cognitive map application into an openEHR-based handover system.
• Conducted usability and attractiveness testing with experienced clinicians (n=28 for usability, n=26 for attractiveness).

Main Results:

• A novel cognitive map concept was developed and implemented in an openEHR handover system.
• The system provides a pictorial overview of clinical cases, aiding information synthesis.
• Clinicians rated the tool highly for task suitability, attractiveness, and pragmatism.

Conclusions:

• Cognitive maps are proposed as an effective method for visualising clinical cases during time-limited handovers.
• This visual approach addresses the limitations of textual, checklist-like presentations.
• The developed tool supports pre-handover, handover, and post-handover phases effectively.