End-to-end design
UX Research
UI Design
Design Systems
Project overview
Problem statement
Hospital patients are spending more than 65,000 more days in inpatient hospital beds than necessary, which creates an enormous backlog that occupies hospital beds unnecessarily, prevents patients that need urgent care from receiving timely care, and places a financial burden on hospitals.
Primary cause
Hospital overcrowding
Hospital overcrowding and ER backlogs have caused staggering financial losses and disrupted patient care. Solutions are needed outside of hospitals that prevent medical emergencies and reduce patient demand
Business goals
1
2
3
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Plan the Work -> Work the plan
Aug 16, 2023 -- MVP Launch Date
Initial Research
I initially conducted 4 semi-structured interviews with clinical staff and 3 unstructured interviews with stakeholders to gain insights into their current workflows and explore ways we could create value for them.
I wanted to know about the tools they were using and how they were using them. Are they using any self-created workarounds? Are they spending time in places that feel redundant or unnecessary altogether?
They've been struggling with getting the correct information to flow back and forth. We're living in two worlds and it is very manual what we do. Since it is a very manual process right now, I would love to see the two systems talk more. It would be great.
Lisa, Lead Biometric Nurse
I'm very excited, Lisa was telling me about this and how exciting it is to be able to kinda create something that works better than what we have.
Jodi, Biometric Nurse
Yeah, we have a lot of technology issues. We have both connection issues. We have equipment issues where the tablet is not working or the blood pressure cuff is not working. It's every single tablet, every visit we are having to reach out to {current service} to have them try to fix the tablet.
Lisa, Lead Biometric Nurse
Key Takeaways
A reliable & performant biometric monitoring dashboard that integrates with the Electronic Health Record to display accurate and complete patient data would create value for biometric nurses
A reliable & performant patient experience that communicates seamlessly with the biometric monitoring dashboard would create value for patients
Challenge
Access to patients has been a challenge since the beginning of the project.
At first, we relied on second-hand accounts of patient experiences from biometric nurses and doctors, but as the project has matured we have had success recruiting patients to provide feedback on their experiences + to test new concepts and features.
We have also been leveraging UserTesting.com to conduct remote moderated usability studies with users that aligned with the demographics of our patients.
Initial Patient UI exploration
I leveraged findings from stakeholder interviews to consider business goals and the interviews with biometric nurses provided a jumping off point to approach the best possible UX for the patient’s tablet experience.
Navigation
I initially hypothesized that a bottom navigation was superior because it would allow for more space to display items on-screen, but in user testing, 3 of 4 users failed to identify navigation menu items when tasked with navigating to other pages in-app, which resulted in further concepts using a left navigation.
Care Episode Overview
One concept hypothesized that a wholistic, all-in-one view of items related to the patients care episode could eliminate the need to navigate away from the home page by displaying all relevant information. However, I ultimately learned that patients preferred simplicity and predictability above all else.
Care Episode Overview
One concept hypothesized that a wholistic, all-in-one view of items related to the patients care episode could eliminate the need to navigate away from the home page by displaying all relevant information. However, I ultimately learned that patients preferred simplicity and predictability above all else.
Solution
Center stage. Simple.
Patients want to easily be able to see their vital readings, so I chose to let this data take center stage with a minimal approach. Biometric data immediately appears in these components when taken with the provided biometric devices, and tapping on them invokes a number pad to manually record a reading.
Familiar Calendar Format
75% of user testing participants reported using Google Calendar to manage events in their personal lives, and 90% of users reported using a hard copy calendar in addition to or in place of a digital calendar
The Clinical Assistant is the role responsible for scheduling patients’ daily visits with doctors and typically schedule virtual appointments for patients 3-7 days in advance.
Visualizing the data
2 out of 8 of our initial test participants reported using health tracking apps like Apple Health to track their steps, which made me curious to understand how they prefer to see data visualized.
While the bar graph in Apple Health was seen as useful to see their daily steps data, when presented with a side by side of a table and bar graph, all 8 participants preferred to see a table to view the historical biometric readings.
Group chat
The second most preferred way to communicate with the clinical team is via messaging. 90% of test participants reported using MyChart to communicate with other healthcare providers, and based on their experience with it, expected to be able to communicate with their care team by message and receive a response within ~48 hours.
Business Impact
Inbound Health is forecasted to reduce the amount of unnecessary inpatient stays by 50 patients per month on the conservative end, reducing the number of days patients spend in hospital beds unnecessarily, which alleviates the backlogs in emergency departments and allows health systems to provide care for the patients that need it most -- all while saving and earning more.
50
Patients per month
(conservative estimate)
X
$1,500 - $3,000
Revenue per patient
Savings per hospital per year