OnCall: An app to help doctors on call better organize their work (short version)
You can find a more extensive report about the design process to create OnCall App here
Helping doctors focus on what’s important
OnCall is an app for medical specialists who want a clean and straightforward way to keep tabs on what they have to do on their emergency shifts, focused on what’s important: the patients.
Understanding doctors on emergency shifts needs
Trying to do the best you can as a doctor in a stressful situation is no easy task, so I talked to 13 doctors from all over Spain to understand what they needed to make their work more efficient. Doing interviews and task analysis guided this project to see how a lack of a centralized place to see which patients needed their specific attention could create some confusion. Based on my research, most specialists in this situation write the information relevant to them in a piece of paper that they carry around. A piece of paper that can be easily lost and (as a hematologist from Tenerife told me) when this happens apocalypse unleash.
Who can benefit from OnCall app?
OnCall is designed for specialists who, when they are on an an emergency shift, get calls from the first line doctors in the emergency room because they need their specific skills for a test or an intervention. How this works right now is that
- The specialist gets a call about a particular patient
- In that conversation he or she asks some questions with key information that they need to do their job properly
- After diagnosing or treating the patient, their responsibility over that person finishes
According to the interviews, a lot of doctors write down the information that they gather in the phone call in a piece of paper next to the name and patient number of the person. This pieces of paper are just that, normal blank papers, sometimes they even buy color coded ones for themselves so they don’t get lost, but what if they didn’t have to worry about that?
Introducing OnCall
OnCall is a simple, clean and straightforward app that lets its users log the information that is important to them as professionals for each patient that needs their attention. OnCall is designed to be able to get the demographic information and the severity of the patient from the hospital’s database (using for example the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), but the rest of the information is up to the user because, as specialists, they’re the ones that best know what’s needed to make a good job.
After doctors start their shift, they only need the patient number to get the basic information of the patient and voila, they have a personalized place to add the information that they really need.
Every medical doctor is different
And this is important. OnCall allows the end user to set what fields are the main focus of, not only their medical specialty, but for them as individual professionals.
This feature also allows the ability to state what field best helps users identify patients. After selecting that field they will see it next to the name of the patient in the main list view to facilitate identifying patients.
Knowing what has happened helps understand how to improve
With features like Follow Up and History, doctors are able to understand their work in order to adapt their workflow to what they are really experiencing.
History
A place where all past shifts can be stored to answer the question, how many patients do I attend in a day? What’s the most common test requested?
Follow up
In the research process I discovered that a lot of doctors save cases that are interesting or that they want to check later to see their evolution. This is the perfect place to do that.
Privacy and security are important
Health data is very sensitive information, so all this information is encrypted and only accessible once the medical center has activated the doctor’s session. Also, each app can be linked to each center specific wireless connection, so it can only be used when the specialist is on the job.
What’s next?
On future updates I want to implement an automatic way to understand the trends of your work, using what you have logged in history to create statistics and infographics that can help guide each department in the right direction.
I would love to see how OnCall can help people. The app is designed to have professional doctors needs at its center, and as part of that there’s a feedback section for users to explain their experience and how the app can be improved.
Learnings
Working on this project has been one of the most interesting experiences of my career. It really reinforced for me the importance of spending time digging into the context, frictions and people involved in a process. Task analysis, interviews and user testing really paid off when showing the final result to doctors that told me how they wish they could use an app like that in their workplace (what a feeling to get that response!)
Also, taking into account the conventions used in the most common apps, helped guide some design decisions into something that users could feel that they were already familiar with.
And finally, being able to receive constant feedback from users and fellow designers was key to break blockers and take the project even further.
Thank you for reading and please, if you have any feedback or comment don’t hesitate to contact me on LinkedIn or at hectormrb@gmail.com.
