Symbiotic Design Application in Healthcare: Preventing Hospital Acquired Infections

Abstract

Any clinical decision support (CDS) design project integrating computational technologies with clinician workflows will require the merging of multiple perspectives and fields of expertise in multidisciplinary teams. Much like the tools these teams aim to create, the team itself will need to continuously build, monitor, and repair a mutually beneficial relationship between each of its members. From our experience during the early development stages of an AI-enabled CDS tool for hospital-acquired infection (HAI) prevention, we abstract three central tenets of a symbiotic design process we have found to be vital for aligning goals, priorities, mental models, and techniques among a multidisciplinary team: (1) recurrent bottom-up feedback, (2) continual model (re-)alignment, and (3) openness to co-direction. With regards to these tenets, we discuss the successes and challenges our team has faced during the symbiotic design process through a series of vignettes and how these experiences coalescing diverse human design teams can influence the design of human-machine teams.

From Reactive to Proactive Safety: Joint Activity Monitoring for Infection Prevention

“…2. align with organizational goals and culture 3. reflect the structure of interdependent work and mechanisms of control Furthermore, the revised sets of measures generated by the team remained insufficient for supporting proactive safety on conceptual grounds. At minimum, this suggests gaps in team members' mental models, despite adopting a teaming structure with explicit processes for continually realigning mental models (Li et al, 2021). The challenges detailed in this paper lend further support that the soundness of the scientific idea is just one small part of a successful implementation.…”

Toward Joint Activity Design: Augmenting User-Centered Design with Heuristics for Supporting Joint Activity

“…The first round of usability testing was conducted in July 2021 and designs continued to be iteratively refined through the second round of usability testing in December 2021. This work demonstrated the need for mutualistic teaming within the design team to support applications that yield the same benefit for other teams (Li et al 2021). Finally, the introduction of joint activity monitoringthe real-time continuous monitoring of performance over time and over varying challenges-is currently requiring further iteration in the interface design that was not anticipated.…”