Improving Nurse Caregiving
By Design
Video Transcript:
Design is all about getting focused and zooming in. Day in life of a nurse, how much they do and how complex the job of care giving is. So they have to maintain providing high quality of care and maintain safety.
Administration of wrong medication is a prolific problem within the healthcare industry. According to a study published by the University of East Anglia, 4 in 10 drugs are wrongly administered in hospitals and result in patient injury and even death. In 2013, 210,000 deaths were reported due to preventable errors in hospitals.
The Google Glass project is an exploration in application of new technology to solve specific problem. In this particular case we tried to look into the health care industry and to use the glass technology to help prevent medical errors.
We have talked to doctors and nurses… even though they have iPads, computers and stuff they actually don’t want to use it when they see the patient because you know, you want to have that really personal one on one interaction with the person you are giving care to. You don’t want them to feel like they are talking to you but you are all the time looking at an iPad. So Glass is actually perfect for that kind of interaction.
How can we put technology in the background and not focus so much on that but rather be able to do the job better. When technology benefits out weight privacy issues, people become more accepting and comfortable with that technology.
The hands free benefit is one of the best benefit that Google Glass can provide and that is exactly the very important point that the nurses working with patients really need that feature. In fact when we released the video of the use case it went viral and a lot of people thought that this is a very useful tool that can make a big difference.
I would like this to come to life, I want to see it implemented and used in hospitals. I think it can bring great value. It can be very impactful. It can make nurses job easier and why not, why not just make it, test it, improve on that and provide better care.
Use Case
In this project we chose to explore a specific task of a hospital nurse – medication dispensing. We looked at healthcare from the eye of a designer, with empathy for the nurses and the patient. Our goal was to support the nurse and help eliminate errors that can result in patient’s fatalities. We observed and interviewed nurses and doctors, learned about their daily tasks, needs and pain points. We also conducted literature review to learn about medical errors and root causes that could help us improve our use case.
In order to decide which interface would work best with this use case we went ahead and developed a set of design guidelines and principles that could be applied beyond the scope of this project. These guidelines included;
1. Enhancement and augmentation of the nurse’s abilities while maintaining a hands-free interaction with the patient. Instant access to information in order to expedite the decision making process. 2. Bridging geographic distances by improving access to subject experts. 3. Maintaining respect to individual privacy without interfering with human interaction. For these reasons we chose to couple Google Glass and InMemory technology into a system that would provide the caregiver with real-time access to relevant information.
In this particular use case, the technology we chose was viable for the following reasons: nurses and doctors need to provide better care and the convenience of Glass would provide them with better access to data and a quick detection of human and system errors. Hospitals and insurance companies need accurate data to maintain the quality of care that they provide. This system is designed to reduce errors and automatically update the electronic medical records, while providing meaningful aggregated data for these entities to make better management decisions. Patients would directly benefit by receiving better, safer medical care. The result of our exploration was a redesign of the medication dispensing task by creating an application that will support the nurse from the beginning to the end of the shift. This application will help the nurse plan her activities, validate information, contact expert and record her tasks all hands free and in real time. We designed and deployed a set of screens to the Glass using Google’s Mirror API and produced a video at the end to convey the viability of the use case with the goal of further exploration and development.