Guideline Overview Tool (GOT)

The aim of the Clinical Guideline Overview Tool is to support physicians in executing therapies with clinical guidelines. This tool is designed for execution support only and not for the creation of clinical guidelines like the already existing tool AsbruView. The main purpose of this software is to provide a compact overview that is easy to read and understand. This overview has two functions: At the one hand side it should allow a comparison of the actual state of a patient and the assigned clinical guideline. On the other hand side it should be possible to compare several patients at one view. This view includes at most five patients synchronously. The users of this tool will be physicians. Nursing personnel is explicitly excluded in the design because in this case substantially different points of interest would have to be considered. Further we assume that the users do have a certain background in dealing with computer software. This means that he/she has practical experience in the use of a window-oriented operating system like MS Windows or Mac OS. As output device a monitor with a size of at least 17 " and a resolution of 1024 x 768 at minimum should be used. Inputs will be made via mouse and keyboard. These preconditions are crucial for the design of the size of user interface elements. The graphic design of this tool is developed for the western cultural area. This restriction is important for the use of colors, icons and metaphors at the user interface. The meanings of these parts differ widely among various cultures. Therefore we focus on the western culture. The search for available software and concepts in the area of the comparative visualization of medical therapy plans took basically place in the following areas: • Search for commercial medical software • Evaluation of visualizations in tools for project management • Search for possibilities to represent temporal processes graphically 2. Search for commercial medical software In this area the search mainly took place on the basis of a listing of medical software The products offered by these companies mainly deal with the administration of individual patients and their data but they don't offer comparisons between different patients. In addition only very few of this software products offer any diagrams or graphical representations. Further emphasis is given to software products for the administration of medical practices (financial, medicines...) and to the …