Interfacing with a healthcare network #2

I’ve worked on my initial concept sketches for interfacing with a healthcare network and combined the 4 different concepts in one more complex concept. I did some flowcharts and mind maps to get an overview of my ideas.

This chart shows the basic workflow of a radiologists (Homescreen with schedule —-> Case viewing and Image analyzing —-> Report). I connected all the information from the network that could be helpful in each of the 3 steps. My main ideas for this still circle around crowd- and data sourcing, social networks, emotional connections and telecommunications.

Based on this and my initial concept sketches I’ve created some simple wireframes of an interface (view the pdf here).

Link/Inspiration collection

I stumbled upon some interesting projects and interesting links since I closed my research phase (thanks to everyone who pointed me to some of these!). Approaching the end of the Ideation phase I thought it might be time to go through all of these links and highlight the most interesting here.

concepts for interfacing with a worldwide healthcare network

I already showed some sketches around the idea of a new interface to interact and view 3D models (its obviously my favourite direction so far). But I think I need to focus on more than just this, so I decided to organize and categorize my other ideas and sketches.

So here are some concepts for interfaces that incorporate a world wide healthcare network and ubiquitous information. It’s less about new natural interfaces and more about service, social and information design.

I tried to think about some key aspects in these concepts.

– Crowd sourcing to analyse cases, avoid mistakes and link to similar cases.
– Make the radiologists reading room more social by implementing a social/professional network like LinkedIn.
– Get an emotional connection between the radiologist and his work.
– Link to other data sources from the internet.

See this pdf for more details and sketches.

Norrlands University Hospital, Umea, Sweden

The basic workflow at the radiology department at NUH is basically the same as described earlier for UMC Utrecht.
However there are some minor differences between the two hospitals. It seems like NUH Umea and healthcare network in Sweden in general is a bit ahead of other countries.
At UMC Utrecht radiology requests forms are still written on paper and than scanned and digitalized. Because some of their systems is already upgraded to digital networked technology and some is not, they have this weird mix of paper and digital data.
This is different in Sweden, here they nearly completed the transfer to computer technology. Requests to the radiology department are send and edited in an email-like hopsital internal system.
Sweden also has a nation-wide healthcare network called Sjunet. All hospitals are connected to this network and can share information. This could be patient history and pictures from previous body scans.
In my “directions: 4 – prognosis” I pointed out the trend to more prognosis instead of diagnosis-only at the radiology department. At NUH Umea there is a designated conference room for this purpose. Radiologist present specific cases to a group of specialists. Together they will discuss the case and propose a treatment for the patient. The whole system is designed for these rounds. Radiologists can choose rare, difficult or interesting cases and schedule them for a round. They just drag-and-drop the cases to a digital calender. Some cases are automatically scheduled for rounds by the computer according to a protocol defined by the hospital.

Microsoft Surface for medical applications

I found two medical related projects for the Microsoft Surface table.

This one was shown at CES 2009. It’s a tool for medical education. It seems like a lot of revolutionary projects in the medical field are done for education (see my post about HeartWorks and the VisualBody). I guess its because real medical applications have to follow a lot of restrictions and need to be carefully tested.

Like HeartWorks, this project also utilizes tangible interactive objects. In this case its a physical model of a brain that can be placed on the table to enrich the brain model with digital data. Of course they use multitouch, all kinds of online communications and information from the cloud.  Also they show a flexible display. That’s cool, but doens’t really make sense.

VitraView by InterKnowlogy is the second medical project for Microsoft Surface I’ve found.