Tele-Board MED: Supporting Twenty-First Century Medicine for Mutual Benefit

Abstract

Tele-Board MED is a medical documentation system designed to support patient-doctor cooperation at eye level. In particular, it tackles the challenge of turning medical documentation from a necessity, which disturbs the treatment flow, into a curative process by itself. With its focus on cooperative documentation, Tele-Board MED embraces a call uttered by many scientists and politicians nowadays for twenty-first century medicine and patient empowerment. At the same time, the project is deeply rooted in the culture of design thinking. Accordingly, the benefit for patients should not be at the expense of doctors. Rather, the needs of all stakeholders shall be discerned and served. Behaviour psychotherapy has been chosen as a first field of application for Tele-Board MED. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, an initial feedback study was launched with 34 behaviour psychotherapists. It showed that many therapists are skeptical towards digital documentation and record transparency in general. Nonetheless, Tele-Board MED is considered helpful and promising. In particular, therapists estimate to save one third of their normal working time when assembling case reports with the system. The vast majority of therapists can well imagine using Tele-Board MED with patients. Apart from that, quantitative methodological strategies—though seldom used in the design thinking community—proved to be potent tools for carving out needs and insights that will inspire the next generation of Tele-Board MED.