ACE

"Information Appliances in Clinical Environments"

Staff and funding

Principal investigator: Dr Julia Galliers, Stephanie Wilson

Research staff: James Fone
Total funding: £50,000
Funding to the Centre: £27,314
Funding source: ESRC/EPSRC/DTI LINK Phase 2 of the People at the Centre of Communication and Information Technologies Programme(PACCIT-LINK).
Duration: 2003-2004

Project description

ACE aimed to contribute to work on organizational learning for patient safety in the NHS by investigating a novel approach for incorporating 'lessons learned' into clinical environments through the design of specifically tailored information appliances.

The research was situated within The Women and Children's Services Division at the Bromley Hospital NHS Trust.

There were four significant achievements of ACE:

First, we developed a method called DIB (Determining Information Breakdown), based on the theory of distributed cognition, for investigating the causes of actual or potential adverse events in clinical systems by locating information flow breakdowns. This involved creating detailed models of different aspects of patient care on the paediatric ward at the Bromley Hospital. One of the areas identified as being at potential risk of information flow breakdown was shift handover.

Secondly, detailed models were created and analyses conducted of shift handover and preparation for handover. These were used to understand more about the nature and role of handover and the artefacts used. We noted that, unlike many other safety-critical systems, there was no readily available and up-to-date representation of the 'state of the ward' to support handover.

This led into the third achievement: the design and development of CHA (Clinical Handover Appliance), a prototype information appliance to support medical shift handover. CHA was evaluated by doctors on the paediatric ward at the Bromley hospital.

Finally, we conducted an experiment to determine the impact of displaying the handover information on a large, shared display during shift handover.

Project collaborators

• The Women and Childrens Division of the Bromley Hospital Trust.

Publications include

• S. Wilson, J. Galliers and J. Fone, Not All Sharing Is Equal: Investigating the Impact of a Large Display on Small Group Collaborative Work. To appear in Proceedings CSCW2006.

• Galliers J, Wilson S and Fone J. (2006) A Method for Determining Information Flow Breakdown in Clinical Systems. Special issue of the International Journal of Medical Informatics, in press.

• Galliers J, Wilson S and Fone J (2004) A Method for Determining Information Flow Breakdown in Clinical Systems, IT in Healthcare 2004, Portland Oregon, USA.

• Wilson S, Fone J and Galliers J (2004) Clinical Handover Appliance (CHA): A Prototype Design. Technical Report, ACE/TR3/V1, HCID, City University.

• Wilson S, Galliers J, and Fone J. Medical Handover: A Study and Implications for Information Technology. Healthcare Systems, Ergonomics and Patient Safety (HEPS 2005), Florence, Italy, April 2005.

Related material

• The ACE Project: Research Summary
• The ACE Project: End Of Award Report

Further technical reports are in progress and links will be added when they are completed.