Case study: A web app for patient management
This project was a redesign to keep Nurses focused on patients — not the patient portal.
Some Background
HeartIQ, a HealthTech Startup, is providing in home medical care to people with complex medical and respiratory needs. Due to the nature of the patients who need this type of care, the patient’s status changes regularly — from actively needing in home care (Active) to in the hospital (Hospitalized) to in another part of the hospital (Updated Hospitalization) to no longer needing care (Inactive — Discharged).
There are also business goals that can effect the status of patients. Potential customers who have not yet starting service are in the pending status (Pending) and if those potential customers do not become active patients they go into a whole other category (Inactive — Non-Admit).
Sounds complicated? Exactly, thats why we needed to utilize UX methodologies to make it easier for all nurses to understand and change their patient’s status, because they should only be focused on patient care.
Step 1. Define & Understand
To design this right, we needed to better understand the flow and how a nurse can move a patient through these status’s. I was new to the industry and the platform, which allowed me to ask questions from an outsider’s perspective.
- Is changing a status something nurses had to do often?
Yes, due to the nature of the work, patients go in and out of hospitalizations several times a month. - What information do nurses have to provide when changing the patient status? Why?
For each status change, different information needed to be provided. Surface level, it is a way for the nursing team to communicate information to one another. For the business goals, HeartIQ wanted to track their success metrics as a healthcare provider. The only status change that information didn’t need to be provided was changing the status from Pending to Active. - What did the different status’s mean for the nurses?
A patient status effects a nurse’s work day. Active means the nurses will need to visit patients in their home. Hospitalized and Hospital Update means the nurse will need to go to the hospital or contact the hospital for updates on the patient. All other status’s mean the Nurse’s can remove the patient from their work flow. - Are there limitations to how a patient’s status can change?
We went over the status change logic with the client at the beginning of the project. When we drew up a diagram to make sure we were on the same page, we discovered we weren't. It took a few iterations and good conversations to get the accurate diagram below.
Step 2: Update the Design
Since this WebApp is currently live, we had to work with what we had — minimizing costs, time spent, while keeping the users and requirements as goal posts. Here is the updated flow to change a patient’s status
First, the Nurse would click on the Patient’s status button
Then the nurse is able to update the status from a concise list of options
If the new status is Hospitalized, Discharge, or Non-Admit, the nurse will need to provide additional information.
Finally, two of these status changes were permanent — Non-Admit and Discharge. We needed to make it clear these changes would make the patient permanently inactive.
Step 3: Validate
We brought these screens to the client to receive feedback. They thought we did a great job building an intuitive flow to change the patients status— however the discussion brought the other half of the problem to light. Nurses also need to see all their patients to understand their daily workflow. Meaning, if another nurse on their team changes the patient’s status — how will the entire team know?
This brought us back to the root problem — Nurses need to better understand and change their patient’s status so that they can focused on patient care.
Step 4: Iterate
How might we show the status all patient so that Nurses can better understand their workflow?
Patient Overview
A page for Nurses to sort through patients and list of all recent status changes.
Status Change Notifications
A place for nurses to be notified when there is a status change to one or more of their patients.
Final Thoughts
I want to shoutout the team that I was working with — Sean Doyce, Director of UX, and Kevin P. Bolger II, CEO of Calibrate — the agency hired by HeartIQ. They brought me on to tackle some challenging design debt on this project. This was my first project within the HealthTech space and I was lucky to work with such a great team and client. Here are my key take-aways.
- When working with a team, keeping a clean work space is appreciated more than I thought it would be. The more notes, comments, and arrows I use, the easier it is to communicate thoughts and ideas without being present.
- Asking the right questions to get to the root of the problem quickly is super valuable, especially in client meetings. Sometimes, clients need help verbalizing their own thoughts in a cohesive idea — asking the right questions can cut down on pointless iterations.
- I need to find a better system to track my hours when working with clients. Currently using a notebook — but I think it can be automates.
