piClinic

August 25, 2019November 24, 2019

What’s with the radio silence?

Tropical beach with sunny sky and plapapas — Summer in paradise

I’m finally catching up with myself after an action-packed summer. I’d intended to share much of my summer activities through my blog because, well, it was action packed. However, one of this summer’s actions was the disappearance of my website (more on that later). So, as my site updates its version of WordPress, I thought I’d start catching things up.

TL;DR

In a nutshell, my wife and I went to Honduras for the summer to finish the research on the piClinic Console I’d started a few years ago. Thanks to a Fulbright Scholars Grant, we were able to travel to Honduras for the past two summers to see if I could disrupt healthcare information systems technology in rural clinics.

Short answer, yes.

Of course, many other things happened as well. I’m not sure how many of those adventures will fit in here, but these are some of the things I’ve done since my last (currently published) blog post.

Spoke at the API the Docs conference in Chicago in April.
Read a few good books:
- Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro
- Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More by Mark Graban & Donald J. Wheeler
- Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Wrote some thoughts about them in my blog.
Woke up to find this site had disappeared.
- Got chewed out by my hosting company for not reading the various email they claimed to have sent (but that never arrived).
- Spent the next two weeks on Skype and my slow Internet connection dealing with the aforementioned hosting company trying to find my site.
- Learned they migrated my site using a backup from two months earlier (sending my last two months of posts into the bitbucket).
Hosted 10 undergraduates on a Mercer On Mission trip to Honduras, in which they conducted research on the piClinic Console and got a taste of Caribbean culture on the Honduran island of Roatan.
Spent three weeks on the Honduran mainland during some political demonstrations.
Learned how to SCUBA dive.
Attended SIGNAL 2019.

So here I am; doing my best to get caught up.

December 27, 2018

If we could only test docs like we can test code

Postman logo

As I continue to catch up on delinquent and neglected tasks during the inter-semester break, I’ve started porting the software from last year’s piClinic Console to make it ready for prime time. I don’t want to have any prototype code in the software that I’ll be leaving in the clinics this coming summer!

So, module by module, I’m reviewing the code and tightening all the loose screws. To help me along the way, I’m developing automated tests, which is something I haven’t done for quite a while.

The good news about automated tests is they find bugs. The bad news is they find bugs (a lot of bugs, especially as I get things off the ground). The code, however, is noticeably more solid as a result of all this automated testing and I no longer have to wonder if the code can handle this case or that, because I’ll have a test for that!

With testing, I’m getting to know the joy that comes with making a change to the code and not breaking any of the previous tests and the excitement of having the new features work the first time!

I’m also learning to live with the pain of troubleshooting a failed test. Anywhere during the test and development cycle a test could fail because:

The test is broken, which happens when I didn’t update a test to accommodate a change in the code.
The code is broken, which happens (occasionally).
The environment is broken. Some tests work only in a specific context like with a certain user account or after a previous test has passes.
Cosmic rays. Sometimes they just fail.

The challenge in troubleshooting these test failures is picking the right option from the start to make sure you don’t break something that actually was working (but whatever was really broken is hiding that fact).

But, this is nothing new for developers (or testers). It is, however, completely foreign to a writer.

Here are some of the differences.

November 4, 2018November 4, 2018

piClinic Console presented at IEEE GHTC

Image of piClinic Console prototype which consists of a monitor, keyboard, and mouse — piClinic Console prototype

I presented another paper about the progress made developing the piClinic Console at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Global Humanitarian Technology Conference, or IEEE GHTC for short. The paper, titled Bridging the Gap between Paper Patient Records and EHR Systems with the piClinic Console will soon hit the Web in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library (subscription required). This latest paper describes more about the technical aspects of the system and its development and compliments the papers published earlier this year that describe how the project has been used to support educational goals (Using Independent Studies to Enhance Usability Assessment Skills in a Generalist Program) and foster international design collaboration (Enriching Technical Communication Education: Collaborating Across Disciplines and Cultures to Develop the piClinic Console).

The conference was the first real opportunity for me to discuss the project with others in the humanitarian technology field, which was both encouraging and discouraging at the same time. I was encouraged to hear that the idea still seems sound and the need was recognized by everyone with whom I talked. There’s really no question that the gap it is designed to fill is a real one. At the same time, I’ve been calibrating my expectations on how long things take, not only in the healthcare field, but with foreign government agencies as well. Those who travel regularly in these sectors will likely not see this as news, but, coming from high tech, my time scale needs some serious recalibration.

Wake-up call

At the conference, one research described a similar project (a very similar project) that he’s been working on for the past 17 years to get past the field-test stage (the stage my project is just starting to enter). He described how he’s had to navigate various health ministries across the African sub-continent as well as EU funding agencies. While I’m [finally] realizing that such time frames are quite reasonable in this context, my high-tech industry can’t help but think of what was going on 17 years ago and how much has changed. For example, in 2001:

Continue reading “piClinic Console presented at IEEE GHTC”

August 4, 2018August 6, 2018

The first piClinic articles have gone live!

Although I’ve been in the field conducting research for the past month (in places, such as depicted in the photo), I still managed to publish and “present” several research papers that have to do with the piClinic Console. More are still in the pipeline, so stay tuned…

In Using Independent Studies to Enhance Usability Assessment Skills in a Generalist Program, co-authored with Dr. Pam Estes Brewer, Associate Professor in my department, we talk about how we used the development of the piClinic Console as an independent-study project for one of her usability research students. Dr. Brewer presented this paper July 23 at the IEEE PROCOMM conference in Toronto. The short story is the project provided an excellent challenge for her student and her student provided vital usability research data that informed the design’s iterations throughout the year. The paper also describes some of the other projects we’ve used to help develop future usability researchers.

Enriching Technical Communication Education: Collaborating Across Disciplines and Cultures to Develop the piClinic Console, was just presented in Milwaukee, WI at the 36th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication. Instead of a personal appearance, I sent them this video to present in my stead. The paper details the design process and how it was applied to our technical communication curriculum. For example, as the usability research independent study project described in the preceding paper. Other tech comm lessons the project has produced include some visual UI design, the production of the promotional video that appears on piclinic.org, and several projects for the computer engineering department. The video, on the other hand, provides some of the back story behind the project.

For more interesting articles, see the complete list of my publications.

June 30, 2018

What’s a piClinic Console?

So, I’m taking a break from technical writing related thoughts and posts for a while. For the next two months, I’ll be focusing on the development of, I suppose you could call it, my side project for the past few years. While, I’ve been working on this for the past four years, or so, it’s starting to gain some momentum.

The piClinic Console.

The project’s website, http://piclinic.org, says,

“The piClinic is an open-source, patient-record automation solution designed for limited-resource healthcare clinics around the world. piClinic systems fill the gap between a paper-based patient-record system and a complete Electronic Health Record (EHR) system at a very low cost per system. The piClinic is built on the digital principles to provide an accessible, sustainable, and low-cost solution.”

No, seriously, what the heck is a piClinic Console?

Here’s the story.

Continue reading “What’s a piClinic Console?”