Sprint 4: The Gathering
As our Capstone journey draws to a close, our team is hard at work — putting the finishing touches on our final prototype and preparing our handoff materials.
Our team has spent the last 7 months demystifying the role of EHR systems in physician burnout and investigating solutions that reduce cognitive load.
What we found is primary care physicians manage many acute and chronic conditions — but the complexities of EHR navigation make it difficult to extract contextually relevant patient information in an effective manner.
Foraging for information within a poorly designed EHR system steers attention away from the patient-physician interaction In short, EHR system:
- Fail to facilitate the way physicians comprehend patient data
- Erode patient-provider communication, causing the quality of documentation to take a hit
We created GathEHR, but don’t let the name fool you.
It’s an EHR overlay system, that takes the pain out of foraging for information during the patient visit with consumable visualizations, and leverages speech-recognition technology to generate structured note suggestions.
How GathEHR Works
Gather’s configurable and modular interface provides flexibility to accommodate a wide variety of workflow styles.
Every physician has a unique workflow that aids their clinical decision making process. Gather allows physicians to rearrange, add and remove modules as needed to shape the interface to fit their needs.
Gather streamlines the documentation process by passively listens to the patient interaction and generates intelligently structured note suggestions.
Charting in the room forces physicians to task switch, undermining the patient interaction and causing the quality of documentation to suffer. Gather records and summarizes conversations and generates structured note suggestions, to save time on documentation and put the focus back on the patient.
Gather’s adaptive user interface proactively surfaces clinically relevant information, trends and patterns.
Foraging and piecing together relevant information presents many challenges when faced with clunky EHR navigation. Gather surfaces relevant patient-specific data and care gaps, in the moment of care.
Lastly, Gather’s tracking feature allows physicians to pin longitudinal trends, which can be particularly helpful in managing patients with chronic illnesses.
To summarize, on this journey we have conducted:
- 11 interviews with Physicians
- 18 interviews with stakeholders and subject matter experts
- 10 concept tests
- 10 usability tests
We’d like to thank our wonderful client, Optum, our faculty, participants, and everyone who has been involved in our journey.
This Medium post may mark the end of an 7-month journey, but it also signifies the beginning of a very long gathering.
Signing off (with love) — The Optumists.
