Collaborative multi-touch clinical handover system for the neonatal intensive care unit

Background: A critically ill infant admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit requires complex, critical, and coordinated care performed by multidisciplinary healthcare teams. Since the infant's care is not provided by a single, individual physician during the infant's hospital stay, clinical handover is essential to enable the transfer of health information between physicians involved in the infant's care. Objective: Handover at present is largely conducted in an informal and ad hoc way. A study of clinical handover is required to inform the development of automated intelligent systems that facilitate communication and collaboration between critical care health providers. Methods: A qualitative study in a quaternary neonatal intensive care unit, at The Hospital for Sick Children was undertaken to understand clinical handover and derive usability requirements. This is then used to inform a high level design of a multi-touch tabletop application for handover the design was then evaluated against senior neonatologists and neonatal fellows using rapid prototyping methods. Results: The results of the qualitative study showed that an effective handover application should at minimum include: tight integration with workflow and the physical environment, intuitive and simplicity, and minimalistic design following the 'less is more' philosophy. Conclusion: There is a need to optimize handover such that the information transferred is standardized, and the loss of information and/or misinformation is minimized. We argue that natural user interface design employed in the proposed design will result in improved care and less information loss during clinical handover.

Duke Scholars

Author Rishi Kamaleswaran Trauma, Acute, and Critical Care Surgery