This project was done for a US-based leading electronic health record (EHR) and operational technology firm that provides tech solutions for senior housing providers. Point of Care (POC) is a mobile app that needed to be developed from scratch which provided health-related services by collecting data from various sources.
Introduction
POC app aims at providing a platform for healthcare staff to manage their tasks and record patient’s data in real-time. Every visit by the staff involves performing their assigned duties and updating health records, reports and other medical information.
Problem Statement
The traditional methods of performing health-related tasks were not only time consuming, but it also gets difficult to track tasks among staff and revisit a patient’s medical records over time.
Solution
This mobile-based app would provide all the essential information about the resident and track the services and medication assigned to health service staff. The staff members would use the POC app to visit the particular resident’s unit of their community and give the assigned medication(s) to the resident along with the status and record updates. POC stores multiple medical records and prescriptions of patients. The staff can track and record a patient’s entire treatment journey at POC.
Challenges
- As this was my first project in the healthcare domain, the first challenge was to learn the regular health abbreviation and terminologies which were going to be used in application development lifecycle.
- Another challenge was to understand the different kinds of medications, medical reports, tasks and comments that exist and how to group them together along with making the app extremely simple to use.
- The third and most critical challenge was to design the app in a way so that there would be zero chance of error for a user as this app was going to be used for assigning and recording medicinal informational and services.
User Research
The user research for POC App was carried out with following methods –
- Requirement Gathering – Communicated with the stakeholders to understand the requirements they had for this application. Conducted various Q&A discussions to resolve the queries at various stages.
- User Interviews – Conducted various contextual, individual interviews with different users to understand their traditional way of providing medical services, activities of offline processes, problem areas and did mapping of detailed information provided with the information provided by the Stakeholders.
- Workshops – Conducted workshops with Stakeholders to get a better hold of challenges and expectations from healthcare staff (app users).
Research Takeaways
The app users were to be categorized broadly in three different personas – the healthcare staff, the service providers and administrators.
Administrator Workflow –
- Admin was basically the client who could control and manage service providers.
- Admin could view and manage contract, enrolment, pricing and other stuff of service providers
- Admin could assign services and medication to their own healthcare staff.
Workflow for Service Providers –
- Not only the client’s staff but the services could also be given to the residents from other registered service providers.
- Not only client’s stores but medicines could also be provided by other registered pharmacies.
Workflow for healthcare staff –
- Staff had to give medication to the assigned Resident(s) of their community.
- Staff had to record and analysis of medical information and update the results.
- Staff had to raise the requests like pre-pour of the medicines, refill of the medicines.
- The staff could also provide the requested service to the resident which is not scheduled for their tasks list. These services comes under separate tag called Wisdom2Act.
Design Approach
- Created a single interface for the users (staff and registered providers), where listed medications would be visible as tasks and the users had to update the records after completion.
- The user also had to add the test reports which are required with the medication of the residents.
- I implemented Design Thinking approach so that the requirements were constantly resolved through an iterative process to reach the final goal, to identify alternative strategies and deliver a better product in the required time.
Sketches
Below are the paper pen sketches I have made for conceptualising the application idea
Information Architecture
Here is the architecture of POC app.
Wireframes
Major wireframes of the application
Prototype
Hi-fidelity prototypes were developed for several flows. Here is the link to view complete flow of the application. These prototypes were created through Axure RP.
Testing
- Usability testing – Involved some users to complete different sets of tasks on the shared prototype and received their feedback on their behavior to determine the usability of the app flows. I had also rectified the complexities that were faced and raised by the users while performing those tasks.
- A/B testing – As per the requirement, I had to create the app in wizard-way but we observed that the usability is complex as a user had to perform several actions on the same as well other screens at the same time. Therefore, I had come up with another version. Although both the versions had different sitemaps, the approach was later finalized. I conducted these tests 2-3 times during the whole design phase.