Abstract

The need for medical data visualization within the health care domain to support both clinical research and clinical practice is an important area of research. The need to support clinical research is great as new breakthroughs lead to more efficient and effective treatment for patients that can reduce hospitalization and improve health. With this in mind, this thesis aims to create a real-life software system for the purpose of supporting clinical research and clinical practice in a tertiary care hospital. In this undertaking we employ a combination of the known software engineering methods, namely eXtreme Programming (XP) and the Personal Software Process (PSP). As part of this thesis, we analysed the software requirements in support of clinical research and clinical practice based on which a software prototype is developed. The resulting software is a combination of two software modules: Electronic Flow Sheet (EFS) based on a metaphor used in the real world application and Query Module Processor (QMP) based on the clinical research practices of medical doctors. The software prototype was tested with a live database with real end-users and evaluated for its usability. The results of our evaluation show that our prototype does indeed satisfy the needs of clinical researchers and practitioners. According to our evaluation, our EFS performed better than the current methods used for many of the tasks the doctors did everyday and also scored well on the quality parameters of Efficiency, Affect, Helpfulness, Control and Learnability . We believe that the user centered approach practiced in this development allowed us to create a software adaptable for both clinical practice and research.