Problems

Complicated structure:

During initial user research, doctors expressed the idea that it is easier for them to print a bunch of paper documents than to try to learn and work with the system.

Hard to reconstruct chronology

Each patient visit adds to a patient’s history, leading to large amounts of records with different information for each patient. It is difficult to reconstruct the chronology of events leading up to a particular health event, and thus identify the relevant items.

Duplicate documents

Duplicate documents are a major problem when it comes to using medical UI designs. Clinicians are asked to complete the same set of information multiple times. The amount of duplicates increases when clinicians need to collaborate. This is a time consuming and cumbersome process.

Our Solution

Our solution comprised of a few different elements. The first part consisted of a timeline feature that would streamline visualization of patient history, The main idea was that, in the interface, there would be a tool to view the history of patient visits, recent analyzes, and visits to the emergency. Also, the detailed view with filters by the hour, day, month, and year, depending on the doctor’s needs, will be available.

We came up with a timeline of the history of the patient, his or her visits, operations, medication prescriptions, and other medical indicators to quickly so that doctors can quickly familiarize with the entire history of the disease or restore any time slot by the minute.

We additionally added a heatmap feature to better visualize the ailments that the patient is facing. The stakeholder has proposed implementing the visualization with the help of the human body, which will allow doctors to quickly understand the problem and it’s priority.

GUI to facilitate patient-doctor communication

As part of the project, we decided to create additional screens to facilitate interactions between the doctor and the patient outside the hospital. This allows the clinician to monitor his/her patients’ health, and allow the patient to feel more in control of their health. We have created an app interface where the patient will be able to communicate with their doctor regarding things like asking questions, scheduling appointments, and more.

Clear Architecture

A major concern we were tasked with addressing was ensuring a clear architecture for patient information. The following image shows an example of what the sidebar would look like, and how it would clearly and quickly display relevant patient information. This includes data like the type of visit, the prescribing doctor, and so on. This block allows a “snapshot” of the data.

Lab Tests

When working with EHR systems, it is periodically necessary to compare laboratory tests. Doctors may need to look at individual test results, compare different tests to one another during treatment, and look at important indicators during an emergency. We built out a lab analysis page to better facilitate this.

Conclusions

This was an interesting and challenging project for the needs it presented to create a dense UI that was still easy to interact with and contained all the necessary information. Cluttered UI design is a huge source of error, especially in safety critical environments such as healthcare. Our solution employed various design elements such as smart interactions, chart views, creative visualization, collapsable and expandable sections, and simplified navigation to reduce the amount of user input needed and to streamline all interactions.

Ultimately, this was a valuable project that enabled me to better understand and evaluate usability for any interface that requires a dense information architecture.