Digitizing the ER experience
Emergency Rooms (ERs) are a tough place to be in. Not only if you are a patient but also if you are a friend or a family member of a patient and even if you are a member of the ER staff. ERs are chaotic places in which uncertainty, unpleasant surprises and emergencies are every day and all day practice. Just figure yourself a business where all costumers come without invitation, whenever they want/need, always in pain and often in a really bad, life threatening situation.
We went on a statewide $10 million digital project to improve the healthcare equality and patient satisfaction in the ERs. This project, still ongoing, includes many components, some relate to the patients themselves, and more to the staff — to increase the monitoring and control over what’s going on. One of the tools we provided was a cellular application for the ER physicians to be able to see a list of the patients that are assigned to them, their status and stage in the evaluation process, including immediate push of their lab results. We thought that this will me a great improvement for the physicians who are so busy and have no time to go to the computer station to check if the patients’ lab results arrived.
We did some consultation with senior ER physicians but didn’t do it good enough. We developed the application fast (agile or not?) but soon discovered that it made no difference. The physicians got bombarded by notifications that lab results arrived but as they where so busy taking care of the patients — they had no time to immediately look at the results. Not only that — because of security issues, we had to put the application on a cellular phone that wasn’t the physicians one. Not surprisingly, the devices slowly disappeared to the happiness of the ER physicians who could continue doing their work as before.
Project value for the users and costumers should be carefully evaluated in an early stage. Basic assumptions of the project should be actively challenged to save time, to save money and to save face. In healthcare, doing so sometimes even saves lives.
