HCD/OpenMRS/Needs Report
From Rockalypse
Contents |
Team Management Plan
We will use a collaborative/decentralized approach to team management.
Possible Participants
Professor Jadud has mentioned one or two people who would be willing to participate. Some participants should have had experience with OpenMRS or another Medical Record System. Other participants could have no need for or experience with such a system, and may be recruited from the College or Meadville.
Communication
It appears that the OpenMRS project mostly uses mailing lists and wikis. There is an IRC channel, but not much communication happens there.
Personas
Sean Paul, 22.5
- Data Entry Intern
- Works as an intern at a small free clinic in the Republic of Congo.
- Sean Paul is a peace corp volunteer working as a data entry intern at a small free clinic in Owando. He has wanted to be a clinician most of his life and hopes that this experience will help him make sure that this hasn't changed. His job is to greet and register all the patients who come into the clinic. Although he enjoys interacting with the patients, he feels apprehensive about the technical aspect of his job. His clinic uses OpenMRS to manage all of the patients' records. Since the clinic is somewhat understaffed, he was never given any training and had to figure out how to use the software on his own. He eventually did find out how to do the things he needs, but every once in a while he encounters new situations which require him to give more attention to data entry and to lose on the patient interaction. In addition to that, some of the things he needs to do could use some efficiency improvement and he would like to tell someone about it, but doesn't know who. He is tolerant of this new interface because he realizes that the paper alternative would have been more cumbersome and inefficient.
Amir Wharton, 25
- Data Entry Staff
- Works in data entry at a clinic in Kenya.
- Amir Wharton is a resident of Nairobi, Kenya who works at one of the local clinics. The clinic itself has kept records on paper for years, and has recently decided to use electronic medical records. Before they can fully take advantage of this, they need to transfer all of their records to this new system. They hired several new staff to perform this task, Amir being one of them. His computer education is quite limited, but the clinic provides training for this particular job. Once all the records have been moved, they will need someone to maintain them, and Amir hopes to have enough knowledge by then to be a candidate for that position. His main priority right now is to enter data fast, but this is somewhat cumbersome because some of their paper forms are represented as separate forms on the OpenMRS interface. Specifically, he does not understand why he must enter a few pieces of information about a patient and then enter more detailed information - why can't he just enter it all at once? He needs a simple and intuitive interface that will allow him to increase his productivity.
Abrams Massunaomi, 28
- Medical Records Consultant
- Helps clinics with the transition from paper records to electronic medical records.
- Abrams Massunaomi is a technology expert. His job consists of helping clinics set up the required infrastructure for keeping electronic records, hiring staff to transfer existing paper medical records into electronic medical records, and ultimately making them comfortable with the new system. Although he offers several record-keeping systems, the clinics in his region often prefer OpenMRS because it is free. Compared to the alternatives, some of OpenMRS's features are counterintuitive and therefore hard to teach to new users. Since the staff hired to transfer the records are usually not very proficient in using computers, he has to train them to enter the data through OpenMRS as opposed to directly with the database. This is easier to teach, but it takes the workers longer to enter the data. Since users with different access privileges interact with the system, the system lacks clear separation in the user interface based on privileges. This makes it hard to abstract away aspects of the system that they do not need to pay attention to. He needs a more intuitive interface that can be used by new users as well as experienced ones.
Problems
- Under Find/Create Patient, checking the verbose option doesn't appear to do anything.
- In the search results and patient information pages, the gender is represented by a color-coded picture, which may be a problem to color blind users and, in general, those who are visually impaired.
- Visited link colors for the languages at the bottom of the screen are hard to read.
- The "You Are Not Authorized To View This Page" page prompts the user with a login prompt, and can potentially make them think they are not logged in.
Possible Solutions
- Make the verbose option actually display verbose information or remove it.
- Use the actual word instead of a picture to represent gender.
- Change the link colors.
- Display a different screen after logging in, one that lets the user knows that the login was successful.
