summary
United Healthcare Group is one of the largest healthcare and insurance companies in the United States. Many healthcare companies are transitioning from the traditional healthcare model to a Digital Health and Analytics model - where technology resources are being leveraged to gather customer data, and to streamline processes. United Health has a very large provider network that offers diverse health related services to insurance holders. The Optum division has been working on ways to integrate various technologies into their products and services like Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Chatbot Assistants, and Data Analytics. One of the many products that Optum is working on is an EMR system that can replace a very outdated and commonly used EMR system called Next Gen. My team was tasked with this undertaking.
Empathize
Meetings were held with 2 doctors that practice Urology at a clinic in Las Vegas. Both used the Nextgen EMR platform daily to record patients symptoms, allergies, medications, prescriptions, demographic data, test results, etc. We also did screen shares with the doctors so that they could take us through the common actions that they performed within the platform on a daily basis. The product manager also shadowed the doctors in-person to gain better context of when and why certain actions were being taken with the Next Gen EMR system. A few users were identified, but the main user is the doctor.
Define
The main pain point for the doctors using the NextGen EMR system was the confusing retro looking user interface, slow performance, and lack of desired features that could greatly improve their daily workflow. The interface also created a high learning curve for newly onboarded nurses due to an improper layout of controls and the immense amount of unorganized content.
TEAM
Product Manager (Previous Medical Doctor), UX Designer (me), 2 Engineers, Business Analyst, Implementation Architect, Functionality Tester, Testing Narrative Writer, Scrum Master, 2 Urologists.
tools
Sketch
Invision
Workflow Methodology: Agile
Features were broken down into user stories. User Stories were divided up into 10 day Sprints. Each Sprint consisted of a Sprint/Capacity Planning meeting only.
Ideate & Prototype
Ideation meetings commence daily between myself and the product manager to clarify and refine requirements. Since we are creating the EMR system with visual guidance from an application that already exists (NextGen) the ideation process requires a lot less brainstorming and makes this project much easier to tackle.
Testing
At the end of every sprint the two urologists tested new screens and gave the team
feedback for further modifications.