Lab-In-A-Box Watches Your Patient Interactions
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Project aims at keeping doctors on-track with patients, rather than on their computers.
A new study focusing on easing the burden placed on physicians by digital patient records and aims to help doctors keep their attention on their patients has been release, and highlights of it have been written about by New Scientist magazine.
The study, LAB-IN-A-BOX: Semi-automatic Tracking of Activity in the Medical Office, set out to assess how the introduction of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) has affected the attention doctors pay to their patients during office visits. The project used a suitcase-sized container of software and sensors to measure the way physicians interact with their patients and their electronic health records.
Lab-in-a-Box has been developed as part of Quantifying Electronic Medical Record Usability to Improve Clinical Workflow (QUICK), a running study funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and directed by Zia Agha, MD. The system is currently being deployed at the UC San Diego Medical Center, and the San Diego Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center.
The study abstract explains, “In order to inform the design of future EHR interfaces and assess their impact on patient-centered healthcare, designers and researchers must understand the multimodal nature of the complex physician–patient–EHR system interaction. However, characterizing multimodal activity is difficult and expensive, often requiring manual coding of hours of video data.” That’s where “Lab-in-a-Box” comes in.
This solution “enables the capture of multimodal activity in real-world settings. By empowering researchers with cutting-edge data collection tools and accelerating analysis of multimodal activity in the medical office, our Lab-in-a-Box has the potential to uncover important insights and inform the next generation of Health IT systems.”
While EHRs have become integral to medical practice, physicians are finding it difficult to balance the imperative to enter information into the EHR during a visit and also providing meaningful interaction with the patient at hand. “With the heavy demand that current medical records put on the physician, doctors look at the screen instead of looking at their patients,” wrote lead author Nadir Weibel. “Important clues such as facial expression and direct eye-contact between patient and physician are therefore lost.”
The compact suitcase contains a set of tools to record activity in the office, including a depth camera an eye tracker, and a special 360-degree microphone. The box is also linked to the doctor’s computer, to track keyboard strokes, movements of the mouse, and pop-up menus.
The researchers will compare data from different settings and different types of medical practice to pinpoint factors that increase distraction levels in order to help software developers write less-disruptive medical software. In the future, they envision permanent deployment of the box to provide real-time warning prompts when the physician is not paying enough attention to a patient.
“In order to intervene effectively, we need to first understand the complex system composed by patients, doctors, and the electronic medical record in depth, and this is what our study will finally yield,” Weibel said.