  Making decisions about what clinical tasks to prepare for is multi-factored,
and especially challenging in intensive care environments where resources must
be balanced with patient needs. Electronic health records (EHRs) are a rich
data source, but are task-agnostic and can be difficult to use as
summarizations of patient needs for a specific task, such as "could this
patient need a ventilator tomorrow?" In this paper, we introduce ClinicalVis,
an open-source EHR visualization-based prototype system for task-focused design
evaluation of interactions between healthcare providers (HCPs) and EHRs. We
situate ClinicalVis in a task-focused proof-of-concept design study targeting
these interactions with real patient data. We conduct an empirical study of 14
HCPs, and discuss our findings on usability, accuracy, preference, and
confidence in treatment decisions. We also present design implications that our
findings suggest for future EHR interfaces, the presentation of clinical data
for task-based planning, and evaluating task-focused HCP/EHR interactions in
practice.
