Participatory design of a collaborative clinical trial protocol writing system.
OBJECTIVE
To explore concrete approaches to socio-technical design of collaborative healthcare information systems and to design a groupware technology for collaborative clinical trial protocol writing.


METHODS
We conducted "quick and dirty ethnography" through semi-structured interviews, observational studies, and work artifacts analysis to understand the group work for protocol development. We used participatory design through evolutionary prototyping to explore the feature space of a collaborative writing system. Our design strategies include role-based user advocacy, formative evaluation, and change management.


RESULTS
Quick and dirty ethnography helped us efficiently understand relevant work practice, and participatory design helped us engage users into design and bring out their tacit work knowledge. Our approach that intertwined both techniques helped achieve a "work-informed and user-oriented" design. This research leads to a collaborative writing system that supports in situ communication, group awareness, and effective work progress tracking. The usability evaluation results have been satisfactory. The system design is being transferred to an organizational tool for daily use.
Weng
Chunhua
C
Center of Pathology and Oncology Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA. cweng@cbmi.pitt.edu
McDonald
David W
DW
Sparks
Dana
D
McCoy
Jason
J
Gennari
John H
JH
D002985:Clinical Protocols; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D006801:Humans; D007256:Information Systems; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D012107:Research Design / Q000592:standards*; D012985:Software Design; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D014956:Writing