Cristina Alexandru

Designing a Social Machine for the Heart Manual Service

Social machines are emerging as a focus of research within the field of informatics as they begin to become the central administrator of our everyday communications. The difficulty of applying such systems to specialised contexts, such as healthcare, calls for guidelines on how to design them, so that they become truly useful. In collaboration with the Heart Manual Department, this project is an attempt at finding suitable methods for designing social machines in a healthcare context. It suggests that adopting a participatory approach where stakeholders are active, equal participants throughout the design process leads to a more usable, likeable, and thus more successful social machine. We describe the process of designing a social machine for the Heart Manual service, in which requirements were elicited through various participatory design methods and a proof of concept evaluation was carried out with a prototype. The prototype was received largely positively and scored highly on the System Usability Scale, indicating the success of the proposed methodology.

A Step Towards the Standardisation of HIV Care Practices

Recent improvements to HIV care at the NHS Lothian Board have concentrated on a re-mapping of the processes involved in their existing Integrated Care Pathway (ICP), in order to incorporate improvements identified during the ICP implementation and consider new advances in care. Our work aims to extend and enhance this mapping by formalising care workflows using our logic-based tool WorkflowFM. This paper presents our progress to date in terms of methodology and initial findings concerning actors, resources and workflows involved in the first 3 months of HIV care for the Chalmers Sexual Health Centre. We argue that the resulting models and analysis could address some of the difficulties faced by units providing HIV outpatient care.

Considerations of Interface Efficiency in Scaling up Telehealthcare Systems

One of the most important promises of telehealthcare is that of increasing care provider productivity in managing patients, which is essential for dealing with the changing demographics. Amongst other factors, this is currently put to the test by several European projects trialling large scale implementations of telehealthcare systems. Any minor interface problem which affects productivity at small scale may prevent a care provider from managing more patients at large scale. This makes interface efficiency, a component of its usability, an essential criterion to consider in the evaluation of telehealthcare. This paper describes a post-deployment usability evaluation study of a telehealthcare system conducted in Lothian, Scotland, the findings of which revealed important efficiency issues. Using these findings, and experience from two older studies, it concludes on interface design decisions which could be taken to avoid efficiency issues for telehealthcare solutions.