Designing a Dashboard to Streamline Pediatric Heart Transplant Decision Making

Only 56% of eligible pediatric cardiac donor hearts are ultimately being accepted even though there are long waitlists for transplants and high waitlist mortality. A major contributing factor to low acceptance rates is due to the highly variable decision-making process of cardiologists who must determine the suitability of a potential transplant in an extremely short period of time. The current system, DonorNet, does not present information ideal for decision making under these conditions which has resulted in suboptimal decisions and cardiologists not being confident in their decisions. The goal of this project aims to adopt a user-centered systems design approach to develop a new DonorNet dashboard to better support the decision-making process for pediatric cardiologists. The design of an improved DonorNet dashboard was based on: (1) a literature review to understand the factors that influence practitioners in their decision-making process and identifying post hoc factors that are predictors of transplant success and (2) interviews by the research team with eight pediatric heart transplant practitioners to understand how end-users make decisions with DonorNet and identify common pain points. Based on this, we designed a dashboard using Figma based on our research findings that addressed identified pain points such as difficulty finding relevant data. We measured success with user satisfaction surveys before and after the redesign that included questions regarding how easy it was to find information and confidence in their decision. The expected results of the project will include a semi-functional dashboard that incorporates real data from databases containing information on patient and donor heart characteristics. Success of the interface will be evaluated through surveys assessing user satisfaction, time to arrive at a decision, and self-rated stress levels.