Duffy: Intro to UX design for the ChRIS Project – Part 1

On her blog, Máirín Duffy writes about her experiences helping design the 'user experience' (UX) for the ChRIS project, which is an open-source effort aimed at medical imagery processing and distribution for hospitals and other facilities. 'One of the driving reasons for ChRIS’ creation was to allow for hospitals to own and control their own data without needing to give it up to the industry. How do you apply the latest cloud-based rapid data processing technology without giving your data to one of the big cloud companies? ChRIS has been built to interface with cloud providers such as the Massachusetts Open Cloud that have consortium-based data governance that allow for users to control their own data.

I want to emphasize the cloud-based computing piece here because it’s important – ChRIS allows you [to] run image processing tools at scale in the cloud, so elaborate image processing that typically days, weeks, or months to complete could be completed in minutes. For a patient, this could enable a huge positive shift in their care – rather than have to wait for days to get back results of an imaging procedure (like an MRI), they could be consulted by their doctor and make decisions about their care that day.'