Clinical Workflows – Rick Franklin

Offer a better way for clinics to achieve more successful patient outcomes through incremental change.

Clinics were still sending paperwork via faxes, so they need to more efficiently set up appointments for procedures, tests, and lab work. They also needed better access to view resource availability at the nearby hospital. Why? Because too many patients either wouldn’t show up, bring the proper paperwork, or else not all the required appointments were properly scheduled and they’d be forced to return another day.

My Role

Lead Product Designer

Team

2 Sr. Product Managers

3 Product Owners

Sr. System Architect

10+ Developers

QA Specialist

A prototype enabled customers, team members and stakeholders to get a hands-on test drive of proposed workflow changes.

Discovery

Onsite Fact-finding Trips

Our product team traveled to several rural towns across America to meet with our customers at medical clinics and hospitals. We took notes on what we observed: first-hand customer work flows and patient journeys. This led to questions and follow-up questions. We took videos to help us captured key points and to share with stakeholders and team members.

Client Insights

Each onsite visit included meetings that provided opportunities for clients to communicate their needs, concerns, and insights. They included IT administrators, clinical physicians, clinical nurses, front office personnel, and pre-authorization administrators.

Julie

Clinical Nurse
Abilene, KS

Physicians want things done their way.
Younger physicians are more comfortable with technology and data entry.
Physicians may add tests after staff already submitted initial request to hospital.
Nurses have to use two different applications enter referrals, slowly down process and increasing room for error.

Susan

Pre-Authorization Specialist
Blytheville, AR

Bulletin boards are covered with notes, business cards of health insurance contact information.
Relies too heavily on personal knowledge which makes it difficult to train or cover for her when she is out sick or on vacation.
Office workspace isn’t set up well, and she has to scan documents down the hall and then locate them on server.

Hanna

Patient Scheduling
Starkville, MS

Often patients are advised to go immediately to hospital with paperwork.
Patient may lose or not show up with all needed paperwork — at best causing delays, at worst not all tests will be done.
Requests sent by fax to hospital scheduling department. This is huge pain point and opportunity for failure due to technical and human error.

UX Leadership

I worked with the lead Product Manager in refining the product vision from the pilot program. Concerted effort was made to get Product Owners and Senior System Architect on board with workflows and user interface screens and included:

Kept team focus on two points: customer empathy and what problem were we solving
Improved and refined work flows to accommodate wider-range of customers
Updated design patterns and better organized page layouts