UX Approach to Designing a Clinical Decision Support System for Pain

The User Experience-driven Innovation (UXDI) framework emphasizes the importance of understanding user needs in product design, particularly in developing effective healthcare solutions. This research applies the UXDI framework to design a Smart Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) aimed at assisting healthcare professionals in managing chronic pain, a condition that significantly impacts patients’ quality of life and poses considerable challenges for healthcare providers. This CDSS design focuses on the inspiration phase of the UXDI framework to identify the characteristics and needs of target users, i.e., healthcare professionals, and to understand their tasks. We start the inspiration phase by interviewing three physicians from oncology, pain management, and dental surgery—fields where pain management is crucial. These interviews gathered detailed information about physicians’ workflows and interactions with patients related to treating and managing chronic pain. The resulting information verified the need for an intuitive and easy to use smart pain CDSS in clinical practice and informed the development of a high-level task experience map as well as two personas representing target users of a smart CDSS. Analysis of the interviews also highlighted the need for a dashboard to provide clinicians with the information that they need for patient care in an intuitive and concise way.