JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In the Emergency Department (ED), healthcare providers face extraordinary pressures in delivering accurate diagnoses and care, often working with fragmented or inaccessible patient histories while managing severe time constraints and constant interruptions. These challenges and pressures may lead to potential errors in the ED diagnostic process and risks to patient safety. With the advances in technology, technological interventions have been developed to support ED providers in such pressured settings. However, these interventions may not align with the current practices of ED providers. To better design provider-centered interventions, identifying the needs of ED providers in the diagnostic process is critical.

Objective:

This study aims to identify providers’ needs in the ED diagnostic process by inviting them to participatory design sessions and to present potential design guidelines for provider-centered technological interventions that support decision-making and reduce errors.

Methods:

We conducted a participatory design study with ED providers to validate their needs and identify considerations for designing provider-centered interventions to improve diagnostic safety. We used nine technological intervention ideas as storyboards to evaluate the study participants' needs. We had participants discuss the use cases of each intervention idea to assess their needs during the ED care process and facilitated co-design activities with the participants to improve the technological intervention designs. We audio- and video-recorded the design sessions. We then analyzed session transcripts, field notes, and design sketches. In total, we conducted six design sessions with 17 ED frontline providers.

Results:

Through design sessions with ED providers, we identified four key needs of providers in the diagnostic process: information integration, patient prioritization, provider-patient communication, and care coordination. We interpreted them as insights for designing technological interventions for ED patients. Hence, we discuss the design implications for technological interventions in four key areas: 1) Enhancing provider-provider communication, 2) Enhancing provider-patient communication, 3) Optimizing the integration of advanced technology, and 4) Unleashing the potential of AI tools in the ED to improve diagnosis. This work offers evidence-based technology design suggestions for improving diagnostic processes.

Conclusions:

This study provides unique insights for designing technological interventions to support ED diagnostic processes. By inviting ED providers into the design process, we present unique insights into the diagnostic process and design considerations for designing novel technological interventions to meet ED providers’ needs in the diagnostic process.