Patient Medical Management App
iCare is a proposal for a new app that enables patients’ connectivity with their healthcare providers throughout their healthcare journey. This cloud-based digital solution supports patients’ needs and reduces communication and access barriers across doctor’s offices, building a robust information ecosystem for every patient.
Role: Lead Product Designer
Challenge
For this concept design, I was tasked to identifying a digital design problem we would like to solve. I decided to choose a problem that many Canadians face on a daily basis. Today, patients are looking for a seamless, convenient, and transparent experience with their healthcare providers that can potentially improve their journey, as well as enable medical practitioners to effectively support large numbers of patients.
The challenge was to design and invent a completely new system from ideation to execution that can reduce complexity and increase efficiency in patient appointment scheduling and data management.
The Why
In today’s day and age, with IoT, blockchain, and cloud-based smart services, we should be able to create a unique system that is universal not just locally but rather globally. This would eliminate the need for paper trails and patient bracelets. Wherever we go, our data and the collective knowledge of all our medical records will travel with us.
In a survey conducted by West, a cloud-based data analytics company, 88% of patients will switch their providers if they are not satisfied with their overall experiences. I had firsthand experience of the problems we face when medical information was not seamlessly transitioned between practitioners, especially when I moved from Dubai to Toronto.
Discovery Research
Before diving into defining a solution, I began my discovery research by identifying my target segment of 5-8 participants. My user segment was a mix of males and females between the ages of 25-50 years old, who had experience setting up medical appointments and prescription refill processes in the last 1-4 months. The reason I wanted their experience to be fairly recent was to ensure I can capture their raw feedback with as little memory loss of some of the details of their experience as possible. Through one-on-one sessions of about 30-45 mins each, I was able to understand participants’ pain points and gaps in their current healthcare journey.
Ideation
As I spoke to the identified participant pool to understand their pain points and experience gaps, there were four clear themes that directly indicated their needs in the current healthcare experience
I want easy access
When navigating the world of healthcare professionals and medical clinics, patients feel they suffer through long wait times and very often lack easy access to scheduling their appointments
I want convenience
Once patients have already experienced a tiring healthcare journey, it is exacerbated by a tedious prescription request process. Participants felt that they had to unnecessarily wait in line to request a prescription refill and did not have a better way to improve their experience.
I want flexibility
All participants shared a sense of anxiety about check-in at the right time for their appointments with the fear of losing their spot in the queue and having to wait longer than expected.
I want a seamless experience
For all participants, their healthcare journey was very disrupted and made it difficult for them to manage all the information without a central repository that can be accessed by all healthcare professionals
In order to address the aforementioned pain points and needs, I began my sketches to ideate a seamless integrated digital solution. This digital product would support patients to manage their appointments, tracking prescription medications and managing communication/records across all their medical doctor’s offices through a unified experience.
User Flows
Once there was a good sense of the high-level concept, I started to define the experience by laying out user flows. These flows allowed me to explore ways to improve how users would move through the entire experience and create efficiencies where needed. I was also able to begin looking at the overall information architecture of the app, high-level features, and how each section would connect with one another.
In order to keep the application simple, I focused on the following features for the product MVP:
Onboarding
Appointment scheduling
Prescription refill
Medical records
Wireframing is a great asset for designers to communicate the experience without having to spend time producing hi-fi visual designs. Through the below low and medium-fidelity wireframes, I was able to visualize the relationships between each piece of the app and how the user flows translated into experience design. These wireframes allowed me to stress test the concept with my professors, as well as with the target user group I had interviewed in discovery.
Low-Fidelity Wires
I tested the low-fidelity wireframes through paper prototyping with my friends and family participant pool to get their feedback on the overall user flow and experience. This was the same user pool that shared their pain points in the current healthcare journey. Some of the key takeaways to improve the experience was:
Ensure all CTAs are clearly identified and labeled so users can understand expected actions
Reduce the cognitive load on the user by creating easy access points to the home screen, without having to click through multiple CTAs
Ensure the refill process is in context with how pharmacies really work in Ontario. Once a pharmacy has filled a prescription, the process of moving the prescription to another pharmacy is different than choosing a location for a new prescription
Consider the ability to capture a prescription through OCR functionality, to make it easier for patients
Consider creating relevant categories for appointment scheduling such as geolocation, urgency, and medical history
Mid-Fidelity Wires
Once I made updates to the experience, I was able to generate mid-fidelity wireframes to test both the user flows and the app interactions with the participants. Some takeaways from this round of testing were:
All users found the app easy to use and navigate
All users were able to understand where they were in their tasks and could trace their steps easily
There was some confusion about certain sections of the application, such as ‘Health Records’ and what content would live there.
Design Implication: either remove sections that were unnecessary for the users or provide explicit information about its existence
Some users were uncertain about the search functionality and did not understand what to expect from it.
Design Implication: Introduce the functionality where truly needed within the application
All users felt the success screen disappeared too quickly without any way to review the information again.
Design Implication: Ensure users can always go back to review their actions in the appropriate sections of the application, as well as assess how long users expect to view the success screens and update the interaction
Design System
Since this was a university project, I had the flexibility to inform the visual design and create a system that would bring clarity, consistency, and focus to the application. I wanted to establish the core brand identity of the application by ensuring I consider some of the pain points users had with existing healthcare solutions today. Understanding that while users might not have a deep sense of what a design system does, they do understand how they feel when experiencing any given website or application.
By exposing participants to a wide variety of existing healthcare-related digital solutions, I was able to understand what worked and didn’t work for them. At the end of the day, the goal is to develop a design system that resonates with the target audience. I ran a few A/B tests with a variety of color palettes, iconography, and illustration suggestions with my participants, to see how they react to the design decisions I was intending to make.
In the end, I went with a palette that was inspired by a few different meditation and medical applications, that also considered accessibility through the usage of contrast. My final color palette creates a sense of ease and comfort for the user, whilst ensuring visual cues can be used to indicate the actions users need to take.
For typography, CTAs, and form fields, I wanted to create simple and accessible components, typestack, and hierarchy. I chose to leverage material design to build and define these components of the design system.
Final Designs
Learnings
Through the iterative process of usability testing and design change, I could heavily rely on the 5-8 participants who were providing their feedback from the beginning. Some of my learnings for the application usability and design as well as designing a test were:
Improve user onboarding to the app by reducing manual data entry and capturing critical information through OCR and Image Capture functionality
Allow users to edit any information that is incorrectly captured, to increase their trust and reliability in the app
Breakdown longer flows into smaller tasks, so users can easily navigate through the next steps
Always allow users to review their choices before confirming their decisions
Features
Considering the initial features identified in the initial ideation, I was able to prioritize the MVP features down to 3 high-value drivers:
Onboarding
Appointment scheduling
Prescription refill.
To further define the requirements and user stories, I made considerations in leveraging existing data, APIs, and integrated solutions that would reduce the operational burden for the healthcare providers, and make the experience seamless for the user
Onboarding
Seamless patient onboarding allows automated data input through image capturing and validation. The user needs to make minimal manual actions to get through this onboarding experience.
Appointment Scheduling
There are a few different ways users can schedule appointments. Whether through doctor lookup or through location proximity, patients will be able to find the right doctor and easily choose the available date and time they wish to book.
Prescription Refill
Refilling prescriptions can be a huge hassle for many. This app will allow patients to choose from a list of active prescriptions they wish to refill which will be automatically sent to their pharmacy. The app will connect with the pharmacy and clinic’s backend systems to ensure all data is transferred correctly and the patient is informed when it is time for pickup.
Outcome
The intent for the final product was to cater to a broad demographic and empower users to be able to easily book/reschedule appointments, track their medication and manage communication with the doctor’s offices.
Initially, I wanted to understand the current patient journey and identify their pain points. Through the process of interviews and guerrilla testing, I was able to narrow down the concept for the app. While ideation sessions with my peers supported in narrowing the key features of the app.
The overall process of creating this application lasted about 7 weeks, during which we explored and iterated upon my designs through usability testing, peer feedback on sketches, user flows and IA. Once I understand the user journey in-depth for this app - I was able to focus on creating mock-ups, prototypes and eventually a complete UI design with animations to finalize the app.
Take a peak at the prototype here
This application creates an ideal vision that enables patients to be able to easily manage their medical needs such as appointments and prescriptions through a singular simple touchpoint.