User Driven Design: First Step in Involving Healthcare Consumers and Clinicians in Developing a Collaborative Platform to Prevent Cardiovascular Diseases

Setting Requirements for a Dashboard to Inform Portuguese Decision-Makers About Environment Health in an Urban Setting

Dashboards are being increasingly used in the health field, and literature points out that accurate and efficient dashboards require not only dealing with data issues, but also ensuring that dashboards are user-friendly and that incorporate users' views and needs. The integration of evidence and data into decision aiding tools, such as dashboards, to assess and monitor environmental health (EH) in urban settings requires careful design. Departing from EH evidence and making use of the views of EH stakeholders and experts, this study aimed at defining requirements for a dashboard to help decision-makers analyzing and visualizing EH information in the Lisbon urban context. In order to set those requirements, it was combined a user-centered with a design card approach to engage EH potential end-users so as to collect their visualization preferences and gather information related to dashboard requirements. Specifically, three online group semi-structured interviews, involving 11 potential end-users from different organizations, were conducted; design cards with a set of visualization options regarding 17 indicators of built and natural environment determinants were used in the interviews to capture participants' preferences and their rationale; questions about other dashboard features were also asked; and the results from the interviews were synthesized into four separate, but interrelated features, and operationalized into 11 requirements for a dashboard to monitor EH in Lisbon. This study contributes to EH literature by producing knowledge to inform dashboard construction, by highlighting issues related with the usability, analysis, and visualization of data to inform EH decision-making in urban contexts, and by designing an approach that can be replicated to other EH dashboard contexts.

Asking the Right Questions-Human Factors Considerations for Telemedicine Design

Purpose of Review

The goal of this paper was to provide a narrative review of human factors considerations for telemedicine. It also sought to provide readers a foundation of human factors thinking and methods that could be employed within their own practice.

Recent Findings

There are only a handful of articles that discuss the importance of user-centered design and human factors principles in relation to telemedicine systems.

Summary

Most articles come to the conclusion that design flaws could have been avoided by involving stakeholders in the design and implementation of telemedicine. However, many of them lack the guidance for those who find themselves having to choose, implement, or use unwieldy systems. With this in mind, this paper provides a series of human factors principles, real-world questions, methods, and resources for those who may find themselves considering, implementing, sustaining, or using telemedicine in their own healthcare settings.