Tim Stutts: ITP Project Blog

Our health care system, though hi-tech when it comes to bioengineering and cancer research, is seriously lacking in lo-tech areas like in-office work-flow. Last month my girlfriend got sick and spent a full day waiting at the doctors office and was then stalled half a day on a prescription for basic antibiotics that should have been over-the-counter.

I suspect that a solution wouldn’t necessarily weigh on building more clinics or raising the pay levels of a jaded staff, but rather eliminating the amount of paperwork that gets pushed through clinics. This tendency for offices to want everything filled out by hand is wasting trees and time, and this problem is prevalent not just in the medical industry, but the law business as well.

While temping for law firm in Santa Monica, I spent most of my time securing printed company emails of the firm’s clients into binders, and then going through each by hand and retyping key details into Case Map; essentially an excel database for the law firm.

Why a business would choose to take text already existing in digital form, print it out analog, and have someone go through it by hand, is a result of an age-old societal tendency to view print on paper as truth, and an uncertainty of all things digital; potentially deletable or subject to change at a keystroke. In court cases a printed email can serve as an exhibit that is called upon by a lawyer and then extracted from a binder. Couldn’t the same document be called up promptly and displayed on an electronic tablet mounted at key areas of the courtroom with just as much validity to those who are viewing it? Such a device would probably pay for itself, when you think of the time throughout a day that it takes a patients to go through and hand write their addresses in a health care facility or a high-paid lawyer to walk across a courtroom and hand off documents to a jury.

Trust of security of data is probably the biggest issue with a paperless data-entry device, but this is on the increase as more people begin to pay bills and purchase products online, and realize that the system works.

When I was looking for an internship to round out the fall 2007 semester at ITP, I was particularly interested in an opportunity at a small company in the Flat Iron district called Phreesia that had been posted to the list serve.

“Phreesia replaces the patient clipboard with a free wireless touch-screen PhreesiaPad. We provide everything you need (short of the broadband internet connection), including a wireless network.”

“Phreesia provides a hands-on opportunity for students to work on Usability Research, Documentation and Design for a small health care software company. We have a very exciting interaction challenge presented to us by the wide range of users working with our product, the limitations presented by touch screen technology on a small screen and the complexity of the information we’re trying to collect and deliver.”

I ended up interviewing for a position early this week, where I talked with the staff, interacted with the device, and finally accept an offer. For more information and a nifty flash animation, visit phreesia.com