Healthcare App Design
Our team developed a user-centered tool for medical record management, sharing, and coordination.
Context
Northwell Health(NWH) faced challenges with data privacy, verification, and transitions of care for ‘Chief Medical Officers(CMOs)' in a singular household. There are critical points in life where a transfer of responsibility for medical information and medical decision-making occurs. There is a risk and vulnerability that encompasses many dimensions of healthcare transition, including the process of enabling and rescinding rights, authorizations, and expectations.
Challenge
How might we support and guide CMOs and patients by developing patient-centered tools for record management, sharing, and coordination?
Solution
Our team focused on addressing CMO pain points, specifically their need to manage the healthcare of multiple family members, themselves included. We created a total healthcare app using Northwell Health design system. The key features that we identified are ‘Connect your Family, Dashboard, Health History, Community, and Resources.'
Key Features
Feature 1 : Connect Your Family
We’re introducing Family Pooling to support and guide CMOs in managing everyone’s healthcare. Users can set up permissions with family-specific log-ins.
Feature 2 : Dashboard
We’re proposing a real-time update of information for quick and reliable access. There are five sections: AI assistant, To-Do list, Upcoming Appointments, Family Status, and Recommended.
Feature 3 : Health History
Your Health Story organizes a patient's whole health history into an easy to scan, shareable timeline. The story detail page organizes everything related to a specific health issue under its own entry including Notes, Medications, Care Team, Records, and Resources.
Feature 4 : History Sharing function
Patients and CMOs often need to share their health information with medical professionals or family members. Users can share their full history, a specific condition, their profile, or even just a document.
Feature 5 : Community & Resources
The Feed section of community presents CMOs with resources from topics and channels that they follow. The Explore section provides the user a way to search for communities and topics they want support from. Lastly, clicking on a specific topic from the feed or explore section leads to a topic page containing a brief overview of the topic and the purpose of the page.
Feature 5-a : Community Channel
Specific channels allow people to connect with their community. Users are able to share their personal experiences and help others who are a part of the channel. This provides support and people can feel that they're not alone.
Key Insights
Theme 1 : Education
The management of care during transitions comes in all shapes and sizes. The common thread is that people don't realize they are going to need help until they already need it. In addition, information overload is a prominent problem. Most CMOs are overwhelmed with too many inputs and confusing or contradicting information, which causes uncertainty about what next steps to take. They need clarity, simplicity, and credibility to do their job.
Theme 2 : Support
Being a CMO is a demanding role. It involves everything from managing appointments and records to making critical care decisions with long-term consequences. Since CMOs aren't just responsible for their own wellbeing, it's important for them to have an advocate looking out for them, so they can make the best decisions for those that matter.
Theme 3 : Engagement
There is a common paradigm and a typical set of features for digital health portals. They are infrequently used and are often viewed as generic. There is an opportunity to build trust and increase engagement by addressing a number of simple CMO pain points.
Our Vision
We wanted to make a DPX (Digital Patient Experience) that was not only a set of tools, but a platform that supports and cares for CMOs along their journey.
User Testing Highlights
Our testing validated the use of a story/timeline to organize past medical history for CMO's and their dependents. They cared about being able to see the next steps in the health journey of their dependents and wanted to receive more education regarding various health topics. It was also validated that this app would simplify the CMO experience overall with health management.
Our testing also gave us insight into changes to implement. We should be cautious of privacy rights in regards to shared health information and ensure that the app is ad-free. We should also have more specific wording for self-rating questions in order to valuable more quantitative measures. Finally, the idea of "Community" was well-received, however, it would require too many upfront resources for a company in its early launch stage.
Takeaway
This was my first project an American client, and my first experience with the US healthcare industry. While I was initially unfamiliar with the US healthcare language, it was an enjoyable experience learning about a new industry. Since healthcare is so closely connected to human life and death, I felt that my work with this industry was more meaningful. This project underscored how core "empathy" for people's situation's and needs are to create improvements in UX. Also, this project took a long time to understand many different stakeholders' requirements and even coordinate different opinions within the team. Through this, I was able to have a humble experience learning how to navigate conflicting opinions and that in order to achieve the best design, sometimes it requires a lot of time.