| Data Management SystemImproving technology at the hospital bedside helps nurses make accurate evaluations of patients without needing the help of MDs or the lab. Today, when a patient’s condition changes, nurses can use handheld glucose meters to quickly identify possible causes and take appropriate action. But, even though many bedside tests are no longer processed in the lab, they remain the responsibility of the lab according to hospital regulators. Because of this, nurses must be trained in lab procedures, and abide by lab policies. The lab must keep track of all bedside tests, and many hospital labs have created a position to do this — the Point of Care Coordinator (POCC). One of the POCC’s many jobs is to ensure that everyone who operates a glucose meter is certfied by the lab, that all the glucose results are tracked, and that all meters are calibrated.
We designed Abbott’s data management interface to support the work of POCCs, and we grouped functionality around their most common workflows:
POCCs need to be notified immediately when certain things happen at the bedside; for example, POCCs need to know nurses have not performed the required QC on the meter. Our design for Abbott groups this need-to-know information, and provides an Alert-builder to help POCCs create more complex correlations between data sets, such as “tell me when an operator does not follow up out-of-range result with a retest.”
POCCs get dozens of calls each week from nurses who have problems with the meter. In order to respond, POCCs need to be able to quickly drill into operator and meter information to determine where the problem is. POCCs currently use a combination of tools to collect the information necessary to solve emergent issues at the point of care. Abbott’s data management system consolidates this information, and gives POCCs flexible searching tools to filter and sort it.
Every Cooper project is a collaborative effort. To learn more, about Cooper projects and design methodology, check out “How Cooper works.” I collaborated in the ideation and iteration of this design with Cooper designer John Dunning. John and I developed the design concepts; John did the artwork for the deliverable; I wrote and laid out the deliverable, a 70-page design specification.
On to: Abbott Labs glucose meter
