Using Clinical Workflows to Improve Medical Device/System Development

A clinical work flow is comprised of the sequential events that occur during a specific patient/clinician interaction. Clinical workflows track the human interactions involving equipment, staff, patients, supplies and other elements of the day-to-day environment. Understanding how these interactions work and translating this understanding into well-designed medical technology are vital to patient safety. The healthcare environment is more difficult to understand due to the increased number of unpredictable human interactions in the system. This is often related to culturally-inherited deviations from administrative standard procedures (work-arounds) with technology or processes. These workarounds are often unidentified, misunderstood or ignored during new product development, as the traditional input specifications are derived from widespread market research or limited input from the product's sales or technical support teams. A well-designed integrated system incorporates a thorough understanding of these workarounds, based on analyzing the relevant clinical workflows and using these workflows to inform a system's use-case development. This approach can result in comprehensive design input specifications for use in building the technology.