Usability Enhancements to a Prototype Clinical Decision Support System for Combat Medics

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Emergency Medicine

Background:

• Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are crucial for providing timely medical guidance.
• Developing an effective user interface (UI) for a CDSS at the point of injury is challenging.
• A user-centered design (UCD) approach is vital for optimizing CDSS usability in critical situations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a user interface for a clinical decision support system (CDSS) using a user-centered design (UCD) approach.
• To gather design recommendations for enhancing the usability of a point-of-injury medical guidance system.
• To iteratively improve the CDSS based on user feedback and comparative analysis.

Main Methods:

• User personas were created to represent target users.
• A comparative analysis was conducted against existing tools like the Tactical Combat Casualty Care Card and Battlefield Assisted Trauma Distributed Observation Kit.
• User testing was performed to evaluate the system's performance and identify areas for improvement.

Main Results:

• The UCD approach yielded significant design recommendations.
• Key recommendations include replacing buttons with a homunculus interface and prompts with a tree and node system.
• Increased user freedom in system interaction was identified as a critical improvement.

Conclusions:

• Iterative implementation of design recommendations based on evaluations has been performed.
• Further iterations and formalized user testing are planned to maximize the CDSS usability.
• The study highlights the importance of UCD in developing effective medical decision support tools for emergency settings.