Approaching the Design of an Information Display to Support Critical Care

Well into the electronic health record (EHR) era, interface design issues remain unresolved. When developing EHR displays, human-centered design techniques are often ignored; this results in a cognitive burden on users. Critical care is demanding. Clinicians' cognitive resources (e.g., short-term memory) should be reserved for tasks requiring expertise, and not tasks of sifting and aggregating data. Excessive workload associated with poor interface design, can place critically-ill patients in danger. In this paper we describe the process of designing an information display with human-centered design principles, and knowledge elicitation through card sorting and subject matter expert interviews. Throughout three integrated phases we emphasized design to support target users. The phases included: 1) Defining Data Elements and Clinical Concepts, 2) Preliminary Design, and 3) Prototype Iterations. Our approach produced in an information display design for clinicians in the cardiovascular intensive care unit.