In emergency situations, every minute counts. Therefore, staff of emergency medical services (EMS) require easily accessible sources of information to organize and coordinate their work as quickly as possible. Digital dashboards can visualize various information at a glance and have thus potential to meet this need. We developed in cooperation with the Emmental Hospital a prototype of a dashboard, which aims to improve organizational aspects of the EMS.
Method: A literature search was conducted in PubMed, IEEE and ACM. The goal was to identify design principles for dashboards. Additionally, several interviews and meetings were held with the EMS staff of the Emmental Hospital and with those of another hospital. The aim was to identify requirements of the EMS staff towards such an organizational dashboard and to transform them into use cases.
Results: Considering the collected requirements and standards of dashboard design, a prototype of a dashboard was developed. It consists of several modules that show relevant information items such as news or traffic information. Due to this modular development, content is easily interchangeable. The most important information for the EMS is shown on the dashboard aiming at saving time for information gathering.
Conclusion: A digital dashboard offers many advantages and optimization possibilities compared to an analog whiteboard. For example, such a dashboard can be connected to other systems and data can be automatically included. Although we developed our dashboard in cooperation with the EMS of a specific hospital, it can easily be applied and adjusted to other EMS. As a next step, we will perform usability tests with the prototype and start implementing the dashboard.
Keywords: Emergency medical service; dashboard; information system; visualization.