Electronic Medical Records
Case study from early 2018: The client is a preventive healthcare company that provides comprehensive health exams and guides participants to live healthier. A custom Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system was created to optimize the clinical workflow. Recent workflow changes shifted focus away from report generation, and the teams decided to create a new EMR.
Due to confidentiality agreement, I generalized the content.
Project Goal: Create a patient-centric EMR system that is optimized for our clinical workflow.
My role as the main designer:
Working alongside program manager to gather UI/UX requirements
Create wireframes and mockups
Target Audience: I created three personas:
Dr. Curtis: She has been with the company for 10 years and is very familiar with existing system and workflow.
Dr. Mustang: A network physician who came on board recently. He has experience with other EMR systems, but very little knowledge of our existing system. He uses our application two days a week.
RN Wendy Ross: She has experience with both old and new workflow.
User Goals:
Physician: Be able to prepare for exams, assess each patient's health accurately, order tests, interpret test results, share diagnosis with patient at the exam and provide an informative reports.
Nurse: Guide patients through the comprehensive exam and selected screening tests, assist physicians, and act as patient's advocate through the year.
Review Current Pain Points: We gathered feedback from physicians about the current EMR via survey and interviews. Main concerns:
There are too many system rules. Users would like more control.
The current system focuses too heavily on report generation.
The current system is encounter driven. For example, while the current system allows user to search for a patient, the results are broken up by patient's visits.
Brainstorm Session: In a three day pow-wow session with stakeholders, we captured the new workflow, discussed pain points of our current EMR, and came up with a list of essential features for the new EMR.
Example of Workflow Change: We introduced a "patient summary" in addition to the existing "visit summary", which addressed the encounter-driven pain point.
Wireframe: To optimize experience for different user groups, we divided the Patient Profile into two tabs - Administrative and General Health.
Another example is Visit Summary. When users are viewing visit specific content, the top right navigation becomes emphasized and highlights the current page.
Mockup: We prioritized designing for tablet, because many physicians prefer to take the device from room to room.
Reflections:
Whenever possible, get direct feedback from users. Although it is costly to take up physicians’ time, getting their direct feedback enabled us to re-frame our design to streamline patient care and improve efficiency.
In brainstorming discussions, use artifacts and visualizations (post-its, diagrams, wireframes) to anchor conversations.
When users request specific interface changes, always ask “why” to understand their reasoning—The request may not be the best solution for the problem, but it always represents an opportunity to improve the design.