PI: Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel

Abstract

Medical reports summarize diagnoses of patients, treatments and outcomes. They are used to exchange case information among different care providers and to request or justify remuneration for treatments. It is very important that every detail is correct because errors may lead to inappropriate treatments and/or lawsuits.

We suggest launching a design thinking project to explore new medical report experiences given that the writing of medical reports is quite stressful for care-providers at present. In particular, we want to survey opportunities that arise on behalf of software system innovations to create medical reports (semi-) automatically.

However, medical reports are generated by and exchanged between bureaucratic, hierarchical organizations. Further-more, they cover highly delicate data. Therefore, a design thinking project will have limited opportunities to test proto-types widely and produce a number of failures. We suggest some changes in the design thinking work methodology to make the approach suitable for high-stake tasks in bureaucratic, hierarchical organizations. We also suggest some new metrics to help reflect or evaluate the project development and to assess project performance.