Rasmus Kjærgaard Rasmussen

Electronic whiteboards in emergency medicine: a systematic review

As more and more Emergency Departments replace the manual dry-erase whiteboards used for coordination of patient care and communication among clinicians with IT-based electronic whiteboards a need to clarify the effects of implementing these systems arises. This paper seeks to answer this question by systematically reviewing studies on electronic whiteboards. The results of the review indicate that electronic whiteboards influence the work at Emergency Departments in various different ways e.g. changes to work practice and changes to whiteboard information accuracy. Also, the review finds that there are mediating factors that have an impact upon these effects e.g. display format and integration with other clinical IT systems. However, the results are somewhat inconclusive and of a mixed nature and therefore this paper calls for more focused and specific research.

User participation in implementation

Systems development has been claimed to benefit from user participation, yet user participation in implementation activities may be more common and is a growing focus of participatory-design work. We investigate the effect of the extensive user participation in the implementation of a clinical system by empirically analyzing how management, participating staff, and non-participating staff view the implementation process with respect to areas that have previously been linked to user participation such as system quality, emergent interactions, and psychological buy-in. The participating staff experienced more uncertainty and frustration than management and non-participating staff, especially concerning how to run an implementation process and how to understand and utilize the configuration possibilities of the system. This suggests that user participation in implementation introduces a need for new competences. Our results also emphasize the importance of access to fellow colleagues with relevant experience in implementing systems.

Visualizing the application of filters: A comparison of blocking, blurring, and colour-coding whiteboard information

Through a mixed-design experiment we compare how emergency-department clinicians perform when solving realistic work tasks with an electronic whiteboard where the application of information filters is visualized either by blocking, colour-coding or blurring information. We find that clinicians perform significantly faster and with less effort and temporal demand when using the blocking interface. However, we also find that the colour-coding interface provides clinicians with a better overview of the information displayed by the electronic whiteboard. The blurring interface did not perform as well as previous research has shown and we discuss the differences between these results and ours. Finally, we find that the clinicians worked much less in parallel than we had expected and discuss the reasons for this.