Supporting medical ward rounds through mobile task and process management

Abstract

In a hospital, ward rounds are crucial for task coordination and decision-making. In the course of knowledge-intensive patient treatment processes, it should be possible to quickly define tasks and to assign them to clinicians in a flexible manner. In current practice, however, task management is not properly supported. During a ward round, emerging tasks are jotted down using pen and paper and their processing is prone to errors. In particular, staff members must manually keep track of the status of their tasks. To relieve them from such a manual task management, we introduce the MedicalDo (MEDo) approach. It transforms the pen and paper worksheet to a digital user interface on a mobile device. Thereby, MEDo integrates process support, task management, and access to the patient record. Interviews of medical staff members have revealed that they crave for a mobile process and task support. This has been further confirmed in a case study we conducted in four different wards. Finally, in user experiments, we have demonstrated that MEDo puts task acquisition on a level comparable to that of pen and paper. Overall, MEDo enables users to create, monitor and share medical tasks based on a mobile and user-friendly platform.