Aleksandra Sarcevic · Drexel University
Supporting Fast-Response Medical Teams through Interactive Information Displays

Despite growing use of advanced technologies in healthcare, trauma resuscitation—a high-risk, fast-paced, and information-laden process of treating severely injured patients in a dedicated facility in the emergency department—remains one of the few settings that lack IT support and depend on paper artifacts. To bridge this paper-digital gap, our multidisciplinary research group has studied the work of resuscitation teams over the past seven years. Our long-term research goal has been the design and development of innovative approaches for real-time presentation of process information to support situation awareness and coordination of these fast-response medical teams. In this talk, I will first highlight findings from a series of studies we performed in a pediatric trauma center to derive system requirements. I will then describe how we designed and evaluated an information display prototype through an iterative design process combined with rapid prototyping and user participation. Although our findings showed the potential for information displays in this setting, the process also revealed several design tensions that guided our designs for interdisciplinary teamwork in a safety-critical environment. For instance, we found that teams' attitudes towards the system shifted as the design went from personalized to common displays or when the context-specific information changed from state-based to checklist-based presentation. I will conclude by discussing these and other issues relevant to the use of IT for assisting dynamic work processes such as emergency medical resuscitations.

Aleksandra Sarcevic is an Assistant Professor of Information Science at the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her research interests are in computer supported cooperative work and medical informatics, with a focus on ethnographic studies of practice and coordination in safety-critical medical settings that inform technology design and implementation. Her recent work is in the area of emergency medical resuscitations, where she hopes to reduce errors and increase teamwork efficiency by introducing a series of technological interventions. Aleksandra's research is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). She was awarded a 2013 National Science Foundation Early CAREER Grant to continue her work on information technology design and development for fast-response medical teams. Prior to her appointment at Drexel, Aleksandra was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the School of Communication and Information (SC&I) at Rutgers University, where she also completed her Ph.D. in October 2009. In 2010-2011, Aleksandra was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she worked with Professor Leysia Palen on the Project EPIC.