A Novel Approach For Supporting Care Coordination Across Distributed Emergency Care Teams

Management of critically ill patients during ambulance transport requires fast care coordination and shared decision making between prehospital emergency medical services (EMS) and hospital teams. Despite their critical roles, care coordination and communication between prehospital and hospital teams remain ineffective and challenging. The current mechanisms of radio and phone are not optimal for information sharing and care coordination, due largely to EMS professionals not being able to provide optimum care to patients while using handheld computing devices. Therefore, novel technologies and modes of interaction are needed to support prehospital care coordination while allowing EMS professionals to be hands free of technology and to tend to their patients physically.

Smart glasses (e.g., head-mounted, wearable devices with a transparent screen and a video camera that can project first-person, point-of-view data to a remote viewer) have potential for serving as an unobtrusive technological conduit between prehospital and hospital care providers because this technology provides certain advantages such as hands-free operation and context-aware user interaction. They offer novel interaction techniques, such as voice control, hand gesturing, and augmented reality, that could minimize the obtrusiveness of the tool, as well as be connected with electronic health record systems and vital signs monitors for an integrated view of a patient's status. To study this innovative technology in this prehospital setting, the researchers will design, develop, and evaluate smart glass applications and unobtrusive interaction mechanisms to improve prehospital care coordination.

The specific aims of the research are as follows:

• Design and develop technologies that support real-time prehospital care coordination.
• Evaluate the impact of technology solutions on prehospital care coordination.

For the first aim, the team will use a multi-phased, user-centered design approach, combining participatory design workshops, rapid prototyping, and formative evaluation. For the second aim, they will assess care coordination and teamwork efficiency during prehospital encounters through simulations and simulator scenarios designed by medical professionals. Both subjective (e.g., survey of user perceptions and workload assessment) and objective (e.g., task completion and errors) measures will be used to evaluate the technology’s impact. This research is innovative because it represents a substantive departure from the status quo in the technology development for care coordination during prehospital encounters. The research will focus on developing a novel wearable system with unobtrusiveness interaction techniques to support hands-free, real-time care coordination in emergency care and other critical care processes. The researchers’ ultimate goal is to build an integrated computerized system that can support shared decision making and care coordination between prehospital and hospital teams to improve patient outcomes while at the same time reducing their cognitive and physical workload.