Sprint 2: Definitely Not A Light Jog

As the weather is burning up here in Pittsburgh 🔆, we’re getting warmer and warmer to honing in on our final product to combat physician burnout.

Last sprint, we conducted a second round literature review and market scan to become well-versed in the current technologies, advancements, and uncover domain-dependent knowledge pertaining to our solution areas. These activities allowed us to 1) narrow scope 2) foresee possibility for innovation.

This sprint we have been focusing on testing our concepts with physicians and diving into prototyping. Our main goal has been to choose a concept that we think is implementable, impactful to the user, and provides value for our client.

Concept Testing

We started off the sprint by doing rapid concept testing with 5 physicians we recruited through the recruitment platform called Respondent. We tested the following concepts:

1. Voice-to-Text Charting
2. Data Visualization
3. Alert Organization
4. Inbox Management
5. Time/Task Management
6. Patient Gratitude/Physician Appreciation
7. Patient Involvement
8. Adaptable User Interfaces

Each concept showed two wireframes that demonstrated the idea. Participants were able to react to each concept using the Emoji toolkit and provide feedback.

Example of Concept Testing Miro Exercise

The results of this testing round overwhelmingly proved that physicians saw the most value in solutions around Adaptable UIs, Voice-to-Text, and Inbox Management. Gratitude and Data Visualization were also highly ranked.

Creating Client Buy-in

Optum is doing a lot of work about inbox management and therefore proposed for us to focus on this area for the remaining of the summer. However, our team vehemently believes that adaptable UIs would deliver a greater impact and innovative solution to physicians. This interplay between our client, team and users has been a key balancing act for our team this sprint.

In the end, we were able to score that right balance of satisfying our client’s business goals and the user’s goals. We decided on working closely with Optum’s internal team on inbox management as that is a very tangible and implementable solution that will alleviate burden for Optum physicians. Additionally, we will prototype and test adaptable UI’s (AUI) as a proposed future state of EHR interfaces.

In fact, after our most recent client meeting, we foresee an opportunity to integrate our Adaptable UI solution into Optum’s current provider portal!

Prototyping

We all decided to take a stab at designing our own vision for an Adaptable interface to get the juices flowing. Each team member came prepared with sketches to walk through.

User Testing

As we are prototyping our solution, we are concurrently doing user research to inform our designs.

We quickly recruited another 5 user testing interviews. In this round, we primarily wanted to learn the following:

1. Discover what data needs to be captured and displayed on the Electronic Health Record (EHR) during the patient interaction.
2. Understand what data organization and visualization strategies best support the diagnostic process.
3. Determine how the required data and clinical decision making process differ depending on the chief complaint.
4. Understand what information captured during the patient visit needs to be reflected in the progress note.

We presented 3 chief complaint scenarios to each participant:

1. Patient with the chief complaint of A LINGERING COUGH AND SORE THROAT.
2. 55-year old patient with a history of diastolic heart failure comes to you with the chief complaint of SWELLING FEET AND HANDS.
3. 54 year old female with type 2 diabetes, peptic ulcer disease, hypertension and gout comes to you with the chief complaint of ABDOMINAL PAIN.

Example of one scenario Miro exercise

We then synthesized all the data from these interviews to understand if there were any trends in decision making.

Scenario 1 Synthesizing process from user interviews

We found that there were differences the way physicians approached different chief complaints. There was a slight variety in WHAT information they would want to consult. What was more illuminating however, was how the chief complaint impacted HOW physicians wanted to information to be visualized.

Below you can see generally how the chief complaint changes the type of information and how it’s represented on the screen based on our interview findings.

What’s Next For Us?

We hope to achieve a digital solution that reduces physician burnout in the following ways:

1. Reduces memory recall and task switching
2. Reallocates a physician’s time to higher value tasks
3. Enhances the patient-physician interaction

We have been working on setting metrics to allow us to measure these improvements and track the impact of our solution. Stay tuned to hear about how we prototype, test and measure impact in the coming weeks!