POINTCLICKCARE
Optimizing medication management between nurses & pharmacies
My experience working at PointClickCare as a UX Designer
Over the Summer and Fall '21 semesters (8 months), I worked with PointClickCare's Product Engineering Organization and UX Team to help evangelize the implementation of UX and customer insights within the healthcare industry. 🛡️
My project aims to connect the community, the pharmacy, and long-term residents' healthcare needs through a streamlined medication management platform.
As a sub-project, I've helped out with updating and designing new and reusable components for the Evergreen UX design system (based off of Material Design & UI), which will be implemented in current and future PointClickCare products.
Project Overview
During Q2 to Q4 2021, I was a UX Design co-op for PointClickCare's Product Engineering & UX team. I designed the system management features that aid nurses and medical technicians in the pharmacy-initiated medication administration process to deliver medical orders to senior residents in long-term care homes.
In addition, I designed the patient electronic medical record chart (EMR) that gives community staff a detailed snapshot of the medical orders, diagnoses, vitals, and allergies of the patient in order to drive decisions in care.
On a macro-level, I worked on defining pain points in the current pharmacy-initiated medication model through user research, ideating design solutions, creating high-fidelity prototypes, conducting user & golden thread testing, and collaborating with cross-functional teams (from product to engineering) to ship product features for the slated Q1 2022 early-access / MVP.
This project is currently covered by the NDA. Although I can't publicly disclose any details regarding my specific work and contributions, you may contact me to learn more!
ROLE
End-to-end product design, including discovery, user research, prototyping, design hand off, presenting
TEAM
UX Design, Product, Engineering, Content Design
TOOLKIT
Figma, Miro, Airtable, Confluence
OS
Website (cloud-based)
TIMELINE
8 months
The problem 😢
Nurses usually spend around 2 hours a day managing their medication orders, trying to connect with pharmacists, and keeping the revolving door of staff trained.
Customer pain points ⛔
- Too much back and forth between community staff and pharmacists
- Difficulty managing medication when residents don't use partner pharmacies
- An overwhelming amount of paperwork to meet state regulations
- Difficulty finding and retaining full-time talent, and agency workers are not always aligned to the community standards and culture
The outcomes ✨
The community, pharmacy, and residents' needs are connected. Medical management now takes 15 minutes a day so the community staff can spend more time providing care to their residents.
Pharmacy-verified medication orders can flow to the community and are confirmed with 2 clicks. The intuitive workspaces aim to reduce training time, serve up priority tasks, and have integrated messaging tools to keep the care team connected.
High-level objectives & key results (OKRs)
01 / ERROR REDUCTION
Improved resident medication management safety (avg. customer medical error reduction by 70%).
02 / STAFF ENGAGEMENT
Increased staff engagement and proficiency in system software with around < 1 hour of training time.
03 / COMMUNICATION
Integrated pharmacy communication tools with an average of 80% less back and forth calls to the pharmacy.
Minimum viable product OKRs
Project takeaways
The value of healthcare UX 🏥
Harmonizing complex product design processes with the complicated healthcare system has been both challenging and rewarding. Over time, I've realized how meaningful healthcare UX is to the world, especially in today's times of pandemic pandemonium. Being able to help streamline medical practices and empower healthcare practitioners to provide the best care plan to people who need it the most is what makes all the complicated teachings and learnings worth it in the end.
Customer insights are 🔑 insights
"Is a product still usable if the user has to get used to it?" After conducting 8 months of usability testing and customer feedback calls with PointClickCare's clients, I can strongly say that if the user has to "get used to it" or "continuously learn" the product, then it is not usable. Design decisions should be driven by customer insights, consistently tested, and validated against old and new clients. TL;DR: there's a reason why it's called "user" experience.
Concluding thoughts 🔚
The completion of this internship has really given me insight into how agile UX is practiced in the corporate work space, and the amount of time and iterations each product feature and detail go through in order to be shipped (from ideation to testing, to more ideation, more testing... to finally front-end dev where you will be defending your design decisions to the grave). Regardless of how challenging or how much effort the internship actually was, the amount of professional growth and support I've received throughout these 8 months will be taken with me far into my career, and I'm extremely lucky to have started my design career at PointClickCare! 💚
