Designing a Machine Learning-Based System to Augment the Work Processes of Medical Secretaries

Advances in Machine Learning (ML) provide new opportunities for augmenting work practice. In this paper, we explored how an ML-based suggestion system can augment Danish medical secretaries in their daily tasks of handling patient referrals and allocating patients to a hospital ward. Through a user-centred design process, we studied the work context and processes of two medical secretaries. This generated a model of how a medical secretary would assess a visitation suggestion, and furthermore, it provided insights into how a system could fit into the medical secretaries’ daily tasks. We present our system design and discuss how our contribution may be of value to HCI practitioners designing for work augmentation in similar contexts.