We are a team of designers, writers and technologists working with associates from science, health and education. 

Dave Pao is a sexual health doctor and a PhD design candidate at the Royal College of Art in London.

Dave’s research focuses on the medical record – the cornerstone tool through which clinicians review, interpret, create and curate patient data. The shift from the clinician-designed paper record to the non clinician-designed electronic health record (EHR) has resulted in a user experience (UX) where doctors and nurses ‘actively, viscerally, volubly hate their computers’ (Gawande 2018).

His research is built on two indivisible premises. First, that medicine is not just a science, but a practice (some say an art) that interprets science (Montgomery 2005). Secondly, that visualisation’s deep relationship with cognition holds the key to designing an EHR that supports how clinicians think.

Together, these two premises can accommodate knowledge that is implicit, explicit, procedural, experiential, conceptual, contextual and/or distributed. Using a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach, through reflection, visual prototyping and mixed methods enquiry, Dave’s research explores how a clinician community’s knowledge can not only be captured but also communicated within the trans-disciplinary field of EHR design.

Research findings have already informed policy through the publication of a national EHR specification and biennial survey within the speciality of sexual health, and through the development of a pre-production interface prototype.
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Refs:
Gawande, Atul. 2018. ‘Why doctors hate their computers.‘ The New Yorker, 5 November, 2018.

Montgomery, Kathryn. 2005. How doctors think: Clinical judgment and the practice of medicine. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.