Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Gaps in patient information during patient transfers from paramedic services to emergency departments lead to adverse patient events. These events can include medication errors, longer emergency department stays, and duplicated diagnostic testing. Hands-free documentation systems could address these gaps. So far, research has focused on the technical development of hands-free documentation systems, not on their usefulness, implementation, or adoption. Involving the people that use the system, a “user-centered approach”, in the system design and implementation planning results in a higher likelihood of adoption. This exploratory research will aim to identify how to increase the usefulness, usability, and, by extension, the adoption of a hands-free documentation system for paramedic services. To accomplish this, I will identify which features or functions of such a system would be important to paramedic end-users and why. Using a web-based survey, paramedics will share which features and functions they find most and least valuable. Then in follow-up interviews, I will explore the reason for the rankings and identify any additional features or functions that may be of value. The research results could then be used to guide the development of a hands-free documentation system for paramedic services. Developers will focus on the features and functions that paramedics value and find useful. Likewise, understanding why a function is useful can help trainers or managers during training and implementation highlight how the system will address current problems in delivering paramedic services. Beginning with a user-centered design approach will help avoid the high implementation failure rate of health information technology reported in other areas.