Division of Medical Information Sciences, University Hospitals of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
JMIR Mhealth Uhealth. 2013 Jun 12;1(1):e7. doi: 10.2196/mhealth.2344.
Working in a clinical environment requires unfettered mobility. This is especially true for nurses who are always on the move providing patients' care in different locations. Since the introduction of clinical information systems in hospitals, this mobility has often been considered hampered by interactions with computers. The popularity of personal mobile assistants such as smartphones makes it possible to gain easy access to clinical data anywhere.
To identify the challenges involved in the deployment of clinical applications on handheld devices and to share our solutions to these problems.
A team of experts underwent an iterative development process of a mobile application prototype that aimed to improve the mobility of nurses during their daily clinical activities. Through the process, challenges inherent to mobile platforms have emerged. These issues have been classified, focusing on factors related to ensuring information safety and quality, as well as pleasant and efficient user experiences.
The team identified five main challenges related to the deployment of clinical mobile applications and presents solutions to overcome each of them: (1) Financial: Equipping every care giver with a new mobile device requires substantial investment that can be lowered if users use their personal device instead, (2) Hardware: The constraints inherent to the clinical environment made us choose the mobile device with the best tradeoff between size and portability, (3) Communication: the connection of the mobile application with any existing clinical information systems (CIS) is insured by a bridge formatting the information appropriately, (4) Security: In order to guarantee the confidentiality and safety of the data, the amount of data stored on the device is minimized, and (5) User interface: The design of our user interface relied on homogeneity, hierarchy, and indexicality principles to prevent an increase in data acquisition errors.
The introduction of nomadic computing often raises enthusiastic reactions from users, but several challenges due to specific constraints of mobile platforms must be overcome. The ease of development of mobile applications and their rapid spread should not overshadow the real challenges of clinical applications and the potential threats for patient safety and the liability of people and organizations using them. For example, careful attention must be given to the overall architecture of the system and to user interfaces. If these precautions are not taken, it can easily lead to unexpected failures such as an increased number of input errors, loss of data, or decreased efficiency.
在临床环境中工作需要不受限制的移动性。这对于护士来说尤其如此，因为他们总是在不同的地方为患者提供护理。自从医院引入临床信息系统以来，这种移动性往往因与计算机的交互而受到阻碍。智能手机等个人移动助理的普及使得随时随地轻松访问临床数据成为可能。
确定在手持设备上部署临床应用程序所涉及的挑战，并分享我们解决这些问题的方法。
一组专家经历了一个移动应用程序原型的迭代开发过程，旨在提高护士在日常临床活动中的移动性。在此过程中，出现了移动平台固有的挑战。这些问题已经被分类，重点是确保信息安全和质量以及愉快和高效的用户体验相关的因素。
团队确定了与部署临床移动应用程序相关的五个主要挑战，并提出了解决每个挑战的方法：（1）财务：为每位护理人员配备新的移动设备需要大量投资，如果用户使用自己的个人设备，则可以降低投资，（2）硬件：临床环境固有的限制使我们选择了在尺寸和便携性之间具有最佳折衷的移动设备，（3）通信：移动应用程序与任何现有的临床信息系统（CIS）的连接通过桥接来保证，该桥接将信息格式化为适当的格式，（4）安全性：为了保证数据的机密性和安全性，存储在设备上的数据量最小化，（5）用户界面：我们的用户界面设计依赖于同构性、层次结构和索引性原则，以防止数据采集错误的增加。
游牧计算的引入通常会引起用户的热烈反响，但由于移动平台的特定限制，还需要克服几个挑战。移动应用程序的开发便利性及其快速传播不应掩盖临床应用程序的实际挑战以及对患者安全和使用它们的人员和组织的责任的潜在威胁。例如，必须对系统的整体架构和用户界面给予特别关注。如果不采取这些预防措施，很容易导致意外故障，例如输入错误增加、数据丢失或效率降低。
