Do we need a NHS Primary care EPR UI Hackday?

If you are a sci-fi fan like me you may have come across the story that a couple of graphic design graduates noticed that on the first Star Trek film all the monitors on the bridge were round which was a futurist choice by the set designers but the graphics they put in them still better fitted a square screen. The two created a whole load of sample graphics for a spaceship that would work better on a round monitor and sent them in. The films producers loved it so much they hired them for subsequent movies and they made their fame and fortune.

Of course Star Trek could also suggest it beat Steve Jobs in predicting the use of tablets by quite some time, even in the original series there were people passing the captain what suspicious look like tablets to sign off reports on.

Of course there is the scene in the Steve Jobs movie – where Jobs tells Scully – he killed the Newton because of its need for a stylus and his belief a finger would be better. Of course we now know the iPhone and perhaps more specific iOS and multi-touch changed the world.

So excited was I when the iPhone came out and the fact the SDK for building iOS apps was free on every Mac – which I'd just bought, that I bought a book and taught myself the basics of programming. The book was excellent – and in several of its chapters it went through the use of several tools for data entry. Sliders, pickers, etc.

I created an app called iCalcRisk which I gave away for free for many years based on calculating a patients' JBS2 cardiac risk. It was a test app in that I used a whole range of different tools (mainly sliders) to speed up the data entry trying to avoid people having to type on a qwerty keyboard. It was downloaded several thousand times and I got a lot of positive comments. I still have some iMCQ apps on sale to this date and over the years I've varied their UI to try and make them simpler to use. The goal being not to need instructions – it just makes sense as it is.

So to the point of this blog, UI makes a real difference. Typing is slow, laborious, and can force you to do things in a particular way. Does anyone remember playing text based adventure games and trying to get the lead character to do something but not knowing the right words. – Frodo give Sam the Ring….

In several recent blogs I've wondered if AI could help interpret either what has been said in the records – making them look better and make more sense or help me get data into the system better.

Coming at this from an EMIS pov the system I use.. others are available – while their data summary screens are a good idea – they don’t work. We were looking at the End of life one the other day and no one could make head nor tail of what was going on with a complicated patient.

Their templates can be quite useful – but they are very text based, old info can be confusing to see and you dont get a lot on a page. Perhaps we need custom data entry for different conditions. My data entry for an Ill child should be different to depression.

Perhaps some of these data entry screen could be designed for people to fill in before they see me? Given the recent surge in online consultation apps – more people than ever before are thinking about what people present with and how to triage them.

Perhaps we need something out of the box! I can see something like guitar hero – either using my finger or a mouse, a series of questions runs across the screen – and I swipe left or right for yes or no – as I swipe the right code goes in the notes. If I lift my finger there is no answer….

It strikes me that sometimes you need new different people to think outside of the box – to bring new fresh perspectives and this could be a subject for a hackday? Lets gets some UI designers from non health fields, some graphics people, some product designers, I don’t know retail layout people, advertisers, in a room with some clinicians and design a better interface; either bits of it or a totally radical redesign.