Interaction Design for Mobile Clinical Decision Support Systems: the Met System Solutions

The fit to the workflow is an important requirement for the acceptance of clinical decision support systems in practice. Clinical systems that do not satisfy this requirement are likely to be rejected by their users despite their functionality. Disruptions and deviations from the workflow may be avoided by the appropriate and careful design of interactions between the system and its users. In this paper we focus on mobile clinical decision support systems that can be used directly at the point of care for the emergency triage. We discuss the interaction design methodologies used to develop the MET (Mobile Emergency Triage) system that facilitates emergency triage of patients with various acute pain conditions. We use a scenario-based design methodology to encapsulate the user’s mental representations of tasks to accomplish, and an Object-Action-Interface model combined with the Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design to design the input and the output components of an interaction framework. We also demonstrate how we have implemented these theoretical solutions.