A patient centric information system that facilitates a seamless dialog between teams of care givers & their patients

With emerging e-health technologies, and changing patient’s behaviors, healthcare services need to transform accordingly towards a more connected and patient centric care system. By applying the Vision in Product Design Method, four types of future emergency patients were revealed and led to a proposition for an aligned workflow for ambulances and hospitals.

Graduation Project

Kathrin Höfer
Matthijs van Dijk (Chair)
Quiel Beekman (Mentor)
Frank Goethals (Company Mentor)
Pontes Medical, University Medical Center Utrecht (Company)

This reframed emergency process should be:

  • tailored to each individual patient, with all health data being owned by the patient
  • transparent, in order to increase situational awareness, trust and reassurance
  • embedded into a continuous healthcare continuum, to make history and recovery phase more relevant
  • socially connected, to improve communication with other caregivers and involve private contacts of a patient.

Based on these characteristics, “MED Dialog” was designed: A front-end for a platform, which links paramedics, emergency nurses and doctors to unify their communication around – and with their patients.

The communication system consists of three elements:

  • A tablet app to send pre-announcements of new patients from the ambulance to the hospital.
  • A smart board app for accurate Reframing Emergency Care team briefings inside the trauma room.
  • A tablet app for nurses and doctors to access a summary of a patient’s health data, to either collaborate with experts or have better dialogs with their patients.

Throughout user research, co-creative methods and iterative prototyping, the project was carried out in close collaboration with the emergency department UMC Utrecht and Pontes Medical. It motivates stakeholders and triggers the next steps in developing a patient centric emergency care.

First of all, the project’s approach is a good example of human centered design, since it focuses on analyzing and designing for people’s interactions within an emergency care process. This was done by applying the theoretical Vision in Product Design framework in combination with co-design. Secondly, the project goes in depth with it’s user research insights, but also the design outcome has a high level of detail. And thirdly, the product proposal is both – a solution for immediate problems of medical professionals, as well as it is a vision towards a desirable future care process.