Quality of care in hospital settings can be significantly impacted by disruptions to clinical workflows, ineffective communication between hospital information systems, and poor electronic health record usability. These issues can delay clinical tasks, increase the risk of error, and place additional strain on healthcare staff, ultimately affecting patient outcomes and increasing operational costs.

Technologies to support clinical workflows and information management are therefore of increasing importance for health information technology developers and health professionals alike. Researchers have sought to understand the adoption and adaptation of the many such systems in use today - from information directory applications to online chat platforms - as have become standard if often unsanctioned tools among many healthcare workers globally.

One particularly innovative solution designed for the Irish clinical context is DocIT — an electronic task management system for hospital use. Developed by Apharo Health Futures, DocIT has been employed for over a decade in Ireland to replace manual task tracking and reduce errors caused by poor communication. Its implementation has resulted in significant improvements, including increased productivity, fewer calls between professionals, and greater time efficiency. The system interface was yet felt at the time of this work to present variations in accessibility and usability with the potential to be addressed through a user-centred redesign.

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It was this challenge that Jinwen Fu, Yabbes Rajan, Vaishnavi Sivaramakrishnan and Ross West took on through their MSc HCI Design Project — redesigning the DocIT user interface to enhance users’ experience. Adopting a user-centered design approach, the team conducted rigorous research into the task management workflows of diverse electronic care management systems by means of competitor analysis, user journey mapping, and heuristic evaluation, among other techniques. The team surveyed DocIT users to understand accessibility and usability concerns, employing measures of satisfaction, cognitive workload, and visual fatigue metrics, which highlighted areas for improvement relating to navigation, access to records, and feature integration. This analysis revealed barriers to usability rooted in the system’s taskflow design.

Following ideation and brainstorming, the team developed an improved taskflow for DocIT to significantly reduce cognitive load. Improvements included reorganised job request pages, dedicated alerts and job history screens, streamlined login access, and enhanced visual clarity.

To enable a sustainable approach to accessibility, the team crafted a style guide for this new interface grounded in research, to ensure the interface would meet requirements for the inclusion of users with colour blindness and dyslexia. This included a colour palette legible for all forms of colour blindness and fonts chosen based on the dyslexia-friendly style guide offered by the British Dyslexia Association. Future work will seek to encompass further usability testing and integration within hospital workflows.