Designing a Safer Interactive Healthcare System - The Impact of Authentic User Participation

Abstract

Abstract. Information technology has been widely promoted in the healthcare sector to improve current practice and patient safety. However, end users are seldom involved extensively in the design and development of healthcare systems, with lip service often paid to the idea of true user involvement. In this case study the impact of sustained authentic user participation was explored using an interdisciplinary team, consisting of experts both in interaction and healthcare design and consultant anaesthetists, nurses, and pharmacists, to create an electronic prescribing and administration system. This paper details the interface that was created and provides examples of the way in which the design evolved in response to the sustained authentic user participation methods. The working prototype both reduced the opportunity for user error and was preferred by its users to the existing manual system.

Genuine co-design: an activity theory analysis involving emergency nurses in an interdisciplinary new product development project of a novel medical device

“…Smith and Iversen (2018) emphasise that the value-driven dimensions of collective design approaches often get lost in the pursuit of rational, short-term gains providing pragmatic design solutions rather than the intangible production of knowledge and community transformation. Solutions to those transformative aspects have stressed the importance of bringing forward 'authentic user participation' (Went et al, 2009) or 'genuine participation' (Østergaard et al, 2018), two concepts that emphasise design processes where participants are truly participating.…”