Dynamic Patient 360

The Challenge

Patient 360 (P360) web application is for care managers. It is part of the care management web application inCare which care managers use to view their worklist and perform care intervention activities by reaching out to the patient on call. P360 gives them a complete view of the patient’s medical history. The data is populated from multiple data sources and updated frequently. Along with providing 360 details about a patient’s health, it has care protocols that are specific to a patient depending on their health condition.

The P360 web application has been there since 2014. The information in P360 is presented in a straight out of database format and it can be overwhelming to look at such large amounts of data. Due to this, the important and relevant information gets lost within exhaustive lists and large chunks of data.

When I started this project, I came up with a set of product goals that the new web app should meet. From these product goals, I filtered down to the following design goals.

Improve navigation through the app. Users should be able to quickly glance at the patient's health record and dive into the sections that matter to them. Information related to care protocol should be present upfront during the care intervention.

Provide a clear value demonstration. Trends should provide insights into how the patient is doing. There should be a comparison to past health records to measure progress.

Make it easy to view, add, and edit the patient's personal information. Viewing and editing a patient's personal information should feel effortless. Adding preferences and updating contact information should be easy to access and complete.

Make the design scalable for the future. The app’s design structure should be scalable to new attributes and measures and help cater to different care protocols across customers.

Let’s start with the design process, followed by how I worked towards the goals mentioned above.

(April 30, 2020) Note: The app UI is still in development, so I’m only able to share a few of the latest mockups. There will probably be some adjustments in production before we go live :)

The Happy Path

If a care manager were to have a great experience with P360 web application, here’s how it would look.

The Design Process

User Research

Over the last few years, we gathered a ton of data from care managers and SMEs (Subject Matter Experts)– via interviews, anecdotes, feedback emails – about how they use, struggle with, and would like to improve Patient 360. With our regular feedback calls, we understood how they use the product.

Highlight 1: Care managers are busy people. They have to look at multiple patients in a day and complete activities assigned to them in the worklist. They don't have much time and switching between different screens to find the correct information within the product and EMR is rather time-consuming. Filtering and finding information in P360 is difficult which makes accessing the information they need burdensome. They would like to see all that information in one place along with the ongoing care intervention.

Highlight 2: Care managers mentioned that they would love to have a summary of what's happening with the patient's health. There are exhaustive lists of unrelated entries due to which they are often confronted with information overload and they don't have to tools to quickly find what they are looking for. Since Patient 360 is a single platform that gives complete information about patient's risk score, ED visits, labs, diagnoses, and clinical overview, care managers want these data points mapped to the ongoing care protocols shown upfront. Above this, they would like to know the active medications linked to the prescriptions and ongoing care protocol to stay on track and measure patient's health progress.

Highlight 3: Many have written to us with feedback on the features and navigation in the web application. They noted that navigating through to the most frequently used personal information is difficult. Also, we are lacking some basic functionality like editing preferences, contact number, and address in a single click. I consolidated this information and proceeded to incorporate design and tech changes in the new design.

Competitor Analysis

When you’re off the market for a while, it’s important to do your research and bounce back! I looked at how other tech companies in the world design their Healthcare apps and EMRs (Electronic Medical Record). Below are a few places I looked at for their designs.

Google Health

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Athena Health

Practice Fusion

eClinical Works

Health Catalyst

These web apps are built for scale. Any UI in the app should be able to cater to a patient with a single health condition or chronic condition with multiple records.

Searching and filtering of information is a huge piece in these apps. It is very easy to find any information about a patient's health from a large set of data.

Visual language in the form of graphs and charts provide insights to the care coordinators so that they deliver better care. These apps provide a 360° view of the overall patient's health in the most simplified way.

The UI of these web applications is similar to EMR to reduce cognitive load on the user when they switch between their product and EMR.

Wireframes

I started fresh by conceptualising the domain of the medical record as a whole. Utilising the fields and sections found in the existing P360, I reorganised the structure of information to better clarify and highlight data of vital importance to the care managers. By looking at the data from mixpanel, I found out that maximum patients (more than 70%) were assigned TCM (Transition of Care Protocol) and ED Discharge protocol across customers. I refined the data points relevant to these protocols to understand where the care manager currently is with patient engagement along with the status of ongoing activities.

I learned from the care managers and SMEs that they view P360 in coordination with care management. Since P360 and care management are divided into different sections of side navigation in the existing product, a huge change was made by adding a side panel that has widgets of clincal overview and personal information within care management section. This architecture allows them to view insightful data relevant to that care protocol from P360 along with the ongoing activity from care management in a single webview during the care intervention. And then I iterated many times on each section of the side panel of dynamic P360.

I also mapped out the the entire web application as it currently exists along with mapping out the data points needed in the care protocol, and ensured that existing features and new features fit nicely into the architecture I was designing.

Now let’s jump into the design goals discussed earlier, and look at how the mockups for Dynamic P360 redesign meet these goals.

Goal 1: Improve navigation through the web application

In the current P360 web application, it's tough to figure out where to start when you want to achieve a certain action. There are stale snapshots of the patient’s health and finding information related to the ongoing care intervention is very difficult.

With Dynamic P360, the goal is to branch the care manager out into different verticals of clinical overview, personal information, and care management flows as quickly as possible in a single webview. I am also adding onboarding for care managers when they enter the redesigned web application.

Goal 2: Provide clear value demonstration

Care managers are always looking to improve a patient's health based on their past health records. Care managers and SMEs have told us that in order to ensure optimum value-based care, they need to be on track with the trends of visits, medications, admission details, and assessments at the same time (to find out if there are any social factors that might affect patient's health). It was my job to help them track the patient's performance easily over time.

Goal 3: Make it easy to view, add, and edit the patient's personal information

An important goal of the Dynamic P360 is to make it easy for care managers to update the patient's personal information and edit preferences (contact details, preferences, caregiver details, insurance plan).

Usability testing the P360 web application made us to realize that editing personal information was hard to find if it is buried under layers within the web application. A huge change I made after several tests was to enable editing of personal information within the side panel without having to navigate to a new window. Surfacing the important widgets upfront during patient engagement can help in better care coordination.

Second we realized that the current P360 web app makes it very obscure to view/update contact details and preferences. It does not give clarity if the address, contact number, preferred mode and time of contact is updated.

In the redesign, we provide the care manager an editable preview of the patient's personal information. The care manager can now see updated preferences and edit different sections accordingly. This transparency in the UI by leveraging the functionality of pop-overs was necessary for care managers to be sure that they are looking at the updated and recent information.

Goal 4: Make the design scalable for the future

The web application has to be scalable to new features and changes to the patient data. Currently, every widget in the side panel opens on a new page, and every editable section has its own flow. This lets us make the creation and editing flows highly-extensible for the future.

Moreover, the product has been designed from ground-up, wherever content will have to grow organically. All the current and upcoming widgets (like risk score) will be built on these models, due to their dynamic nature.

Reflection

Designing Dynamic P360 was a very special project for me. I was desperate to redesign P360 whenever I found care managers having difficulty using the app. Over time, we bandaged and tended to the web application and managed to keep it running. Finally when the time came to rethink P360, I was so excited to give it a new, usable interface.

I am proud of how I made this app from the ground-up and rethought every user flow that's in P360. I worked hard to make it feel easy and exciting to care managers. It is light years ahead in UI and UX when compared to the old P360. I am so excited to see it in the market and for care managers to use it. It's about time we provide the next-level care-coordination experience!