Design of an advanced telemedicine system for emergency care

In this paper we describe the design process of the Virtual Critical Care Unit (ViCCU®) -- an advanced telemedicine system developed by CSIRO in conjunction with Sydney West Area Health Service. The system allows an emergency care specialist in a major referral hospital to remotely lead a team in a small rural hospital during the treatment of critically ill patients. It enables transmission of high quality audio/video information and has a seamless interface to the complex clinical working environment. The technical design team took an iterative participatory design approach towards the system design. The combination of expert user evaluations and scenariobased user testing methods ensured users' needs were designed into the system and verified. Our experience indicates that the success of this telemedicine system relied largely on a participatory design approach, appropriate evaluation methodologies and working closely with users to build a system which was integrated into the emergency clinical work practice.