Modernizing
Medicine
How we designed what our users didn't know they needed, and created a UCD process that let us re-imagine what the doctor-patient experience could be.
Innovating in an industry that did not want to change.
Often disregarded as the unsightly elephant in the room, entreprise and especially healthcare software is plagged as being out of date and bound by red tape.
Trying to become a leader and innovator in this field required pushing the limit of what the industry would accept and figuring out how we could actually improve the lives of our users.
With a goal to revolutionize medicine and improve patient outcomes. We set out designing an all-in-one cloud based Electronic Health Records (EHR) system. Enabling our doctors to have more face to face interaction with their patients, and less time spent documenting the visit.
Improving lives by improving their workflow
Working with a user base that many times was 60+ or older, and had grown accustomed to a certain way of doing things was a unique challenge for us to design for.
Imagine talking to a doctor that had done the same exact paper-bound process for 40 years, and telling them an ipad could improve their efficiency by 100%.
Trying to improve a workflow that they have been doing for decades required us to truly understand what their needs where and why they did the things they did.
Cue months of research, traveling all around the country to get a first hand experience sitting with the doctors who used our products, and documenting any and all artifacts that we could then document and act on.
Growing UX maturity as a company
Coming into a small ux team within a development-centric company was the starting point for the up-hill battle required to instill design-thinking and user research into our organization.
We focused on refining our research processes to include:
A traveling design/ research crew to conduct ethnographic research. Building a guerilla usability lab with actual inhouse eye-tracking. Piggybacking of our user conference to run design sprints with actual users, and creating a direct feedback program for our power users.
By educating, promoting, and showing the value of UX, we were able to turn small wins into a wave of trust and influence to create a design and development process that let us validate, test, and research our solutions on a continual basis.
Establishing a user centered design process
We then established clear design protocols to work together with product and development for a more consistent, and clear user experience.
By successfully getting to the stage where we were able to conduct our research and test appropriately during design, we were able to create actual solutions to our users pain points.
Which in our case meant more meaningful doctor-patient interactions, and less provider burn-out. Getting rid of unnecessary manual processes, giving them back some of their own time and helping them make more informed decisions.
Establishing design thinking grew our UX maturity throughout the company, helping us define and shape the vision of the product, and validate our results first hand.