Category: News Etc

Introducing another partner in our mission to bridge the doctor-developer-designer divide: Fjord. This digital service design consultancy’s New York office will be helping the SMART team create an open-source, web-based, interactive pediatric growth chart application. Embracing a design-led approach to clinical end-user needs, this collaboration aims to develop a new way to present pediatric growth charts so they can be easily read, understood, and shared among clinicians and other medical professionals, as well as used in communication with parents.

The collaboration will start with an immersive phase of interviewing pediatric and medical informatics specialists to help establish current content, context, and usage of the pediatric growth chart. This targeted usability research will surface insights and understanding of how pediatric growth charts are actually used and how they should be changed to enhance their utility for different clinical and communication purposes. The Fjord team will then create detailed designs that will be tested and refined with clinicians and parents.

After the design has been completed, the Fjord and SMART Project teams will collaborate to complete a full development, implementation, and launch of the design, resulting in an end-to-end web app experience to be introduced to, and shared with, the medical and clinical informatics community.

The SMART team is pleased to announce a new partnership that will break down barriers between developers, designers, and doctors. Sermo, the largest online physician community in the United States, will connect us with their network of over 130,000 members for feedback on SMART apps as they are created.

“We are excited to be working with the SMART project,” said Jon Michaeli, VP, Marketing and Membership. “It’s no secret there are major obstacles associated with the implementation and widespread adoption of an efficient IT infrastructure in the US healthcare system today. Physicians in the Sermo community are constantly exchanging war stories, from how EMR incompatibilities cripple their work streams to how they compromise rather than improve patient care. This project presents a great opportunity for them to share their opinions with leading researchers and technologists who are well positioned to make a difference.”

An example of the kind of insights that Sermo has gathered from its members is the Physician Sentiment Index™ (PSI), conducted annually since 2010 along with athenahealth, a cloud-based physician software and billing firm. The 2012 PSI was just released in June.