Measuring Design Thinking Practice in Context

Abstract

Maintenance and restoration of human well-being is healthcare’s central purpose. However, medical personnel’s everyday work has become more and more characterized by administrative tasks, such as writing medical reports or documenting a patient’s treatment. Particularly in the healthcare sector, these tasks usually entail working with different software systems on mostly traditional desktop computers. Using such machines to collect data during doctor-patient encounters presents a great challenge. The doctor wants to gather patient data as quickly and as completely as possible. On the other hand, the patient wants the doctor to empathize with him or her. Capturing data with a keyboard, using a traditional desktop computer, is cumbersome. Furthermore, this setting can create a barrier between doctor and patient. Our aim is to ease data entry in doctor-patient encounters. In this chapter, we present a software tool, Tele-Board MED, that allows recording data with the help of handwritten and spoken notes that are transformed automatically to a textual format via handwriting and speech recognition. Our software is a lightweight web application that runs in a web browser. It can be used on a multitude of hardware, especially mobile devices such as tablet computers or smartphones. In an initial user test, the digital techniques were rated as more suitable than a traditional pen and paper approach that entails follow-up content digitization.