Sprint 4: Interviewing Physicians
Hello again! As you may recall, in our last sprint we immersed ourselves deeply into the world of healthcare by conducting intercept interviews with healthcare workers in front the UPMC hospital and Starbucks, interviewing internal and external stakeholders, and pretotyping our vision for seamless automation in healthcare. Since then, we’ve yes…had a restful spring break, but also ramped up our research recruitment, and further delved into the space. Let’s talk about.
Physician Workflow Artifact
Before starting the physician interviews, we decided to consolidate all our findings into a preliminary workflow diagram, for not only the team’s understanding, but also as an artifact that could be used to invite feedback from our internal stakeholders.
The diagram shows the different players involved in the five stages of a patient visit, the hand offs, and digital touch points. During our remote directed storytelling interviews, we used a blank version of this baseline model to aid physicians to visualize and trigger their memory of “autopilot” behaviors and actions.
Interviews on Interviews
Despite our concerns about recruitment, by April 1 or in the span of 2 weeks, we’ll have interviewed a diverse sample of 12 clinicians — primarily physicians and one physician assistant. We’ve been running these remote interviews as directed storytelling interviews, deep diving into their tasks and processes to gain a fuller understanding of each physician’s unique workflow. After getting a sense of their workflow, we dug into the digital systems they use and the emotions they feel at each stage. We materialized these experiences in Miro as we interviewed and will be analyzing them further as the team synthesizes our learnings.
Ok so, what have we learned?
Well, we are still in the midst of interviewing, coding and synthesizing, but we have seen some initial high level takeaways.
- Physicians are developing lengthy, makeshift workarounds to address shortcomings in EHR systems.
- Physicians linked burnout to decreasing empathy with patients.
- Career stage impacts burnout more than generation.
- Current EMR systems lack tools and proper design to support efficient data entry.
- Frustration around understanding ICD codes.
- Lack of data visualization inhibits physicians from exploring patient’s history in a timely manner.
- Lack of support for younger physicians around EMR integrations.
Here’s a glimpse into our coding and synthesis process.
Seeking Inspiration
I know all this seems like a lot, but don’t worry we have more. Our fellow Optumists, Sophia and Tamara, took a quick trip to the International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Healthcare (HFES) in New Orleans. They were able to learn a lot of exciting work happening at the forefront of technology and healthcare and bring back some practical tips for our team.
One of the workshops Sophia attended was about eye tracking and biometrics. Cognitive load and burnout is directly linked to biometrics and physiological responses. As we know, burnout causes increased medical error and believe it or not medical error is the 3rd leading cause of death. Using eye tracking to gain quantitative data about the current and proposed state of experiences with EHR systems could be an avenue to explore.
What are we up to now?
In addition to finishing up our first round of physician interviews, we also have 2 contextual inquiry opportunities lined up. With this, we’re hoping to augment what we know from directed storytelling interviews and closely shadow physicians in their natural environment.
We’re also super excited for the opportunity to present our current work at Optum’s upcoming QBR in Florida!
Follow us on IG: @DrainedDocs
Till next time 🔆
