Evaluating an Information Display for Clinical Decision Making in the Intensive Care Unit

This paper reports the evaluation of a Recursive-Diagnostic Framework (RDF) based paper prototype for a clinical information system in the intensive care unit (ICU). Based on an observation of the reliability and validity of RDF concepts when applied to real-world data, it was hypothesised that an RDF-based information design might facilitate more efficient information processing by ICU medical and nursing staff. Eight nurses and four senior medical consultants participated in an experimental protocol that involved completing ICU tasks with patient data using conventional vs RDF designs. Nurses were asked to complete change detection tasks, whereas doctors completed diagnostic tasks. The results of the experiments show that nurses were able to identify significantly more changed parameters over broader time spans using the new design compared to the old. Doctors show greater levels of diagnostic agreement using the new design. These findings support the view that the structure of information in the new design better supports ICU roles and common situation awareness.