A Perioperative Care Display for Understanding High Acuity Patients

Area of Science:

• Clinical Informatics
• Data Visualization
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Data visualization best practices emphasize tailoring displays to user tasks, background, and data characteristics.
• Concept-oriented displays are generally effective across various tasks and data types.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a tailored clinical data display for anesthesia-in-charge (AIC) staff to assess patient acuity and complexity.
• To support optimal allocation of anesthesia providers across operating rooms.

Main Methods:

• Employed a co-design process involving in-depth interviews with AICs.
• Iteratively developed and refined design solutions based on user feedback.

Main Results:

• Identified the need to match display detail to clinical task requirements.
• Found that irrelevant information hinders usability.
• Observed a desire for optional, progressive textual summaries.

Conclusions:

• A user-preferred design was achieved through co-design in a clinical informatics project.
• The final design features a binary flag for patient prioritization and detailed textual summaries upon request.