Nurses usually spend 2 hours per day managing their medication orders, trying to connect with pharmacists, and keeping the revolving door of staff trained. Integrated Medication Management for skilled nursing aims to connect primary pharmacies and senior residents' healthcare needs through a streamlined medical management platform.
Type
UX/UI & Research
Web-based platform
Role
Product Designer
for the Wellness Director Workspace
Timeline
8 Months
May to December 2021
Over Summer & Fall 2021, I worked with PointClickCare's Product Engineering Organization and UX Team to help evangelize the implementation of UX and customer insights within the rapidly-paced healthcare industry.
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. I also designed the patient electronic medical record chart (EMR) that gives staff a detailed snapshot of the medical orders, diagnoses, vitals, and allergies of the patient in order to drive timely decisions in care.
The result of this work aims to reduce paperwork from 2 hours to 15 minutes, so that community staff can spend more time providing practical care to senior residents. The intuitive workspaces aim to reduce training time, serve up priority tasks, and have integrated messaging tools to keep the care team connected.
The state of medication management today poses an overwhelming amount of context-switching for nurses, with insights citing...
1 : Back & forth between nursing and pharmacy
Difficulties managing medication when prescriptions are sourced from outside pharmacies. Paperwork going back and forth between facilities, getting lost in translation.
2 : Current electronic medical records outdated
Solutions today involve overwhelming amounts of information on-screen, difficulty making updates, inconsistent inputs, and low visibility of critical information. The user interface is cluttered and unclear to the untrained eye.
Based on 8 months of extensive recurring user research, our Integrated Medication Management system needed to connect pharmacists and nurses together through one platform, to alleviate three key barriers
1 : Difficult and overwhelming paperwork
Goal : Paperwork can flow from the pharmacy to the community to be reviewed at a glance.
2 : Low visibility to make updates to a medication
Goal : Scheduling and updates are automatically tracked to avoid missing a prescribed order.
3 : Multiple tasks and people to keep track of & report to
Goal : Surfacing up priority items in one place without communicating back and forth and referring to multiple different areas.
As a result, our solution would mainly be targeted towards community wellness directors and skilled nurses using outdated electronic medical records and pens and paper to record patient charts
Goals
Ensure the health and safety of patients by coordinating care. Review, reconcile, and schedule medications. Ensure patients are receiving the best plan of care in real time.
Needs
An easy way to monitor and track incoming medication orders from the pharmacy. Confirming inbound orders with accuracy and speed.
However, the complex world of medicine calls for more than just copying and pasting paper medical charts onto a simple UI
Precise templates
General order templates for senior living residents require precision and exact instructions to ensure the health and safety of both the patient and nurse.
Flexibility in scheduling
As this solution is made for a more relaxed senior living community, community directors and nurses require the ability to change when to start administering care based on patients' preferred lifestyles.
Additional notes & directions
We needed to design a space for our users to add additional directions if the prescriber or pharmacy missed a detail, or reminders for the administering skilled nurse.
Desired performance after early-access release
Error reduction by 70%
Improved resident medication management safety. Medication orders can be confirmed, declined, or changed in 2 clicks. The workspace can serve up priority tasks to keep up to date with patient paperwork.
< 1 hour of training time
The current workflow today requires 6-8 hours of training time. Less training time = easier onboarding process for full-time and agency talent. Seamless alignment to community standards and work culture to keep care team consistency.
80% less calls back and forth
Nurses typically spend 2 hours per day connecting with pharmacists to reconcile issues. Integrated messaging tools across the workspaces would keep the care team connected. Less time focused on reconciling and more time to focus on providing care to patients.
The final portion of this project contains sensitive information. Although I can't publicly disclose specific details regarding the proposed workflows and my contributions towards it, you may contact me to learn more 🔐
As a summary, I worked on end-to-end product design: defining pain points via user research, analysis, design solutioning, high-fidelity prototyping and handoffs. I assisted with conducting golden thread testing comparing our beta solution versus primary competitors in the market. Once designs were finalized, I collaborated with cross-functional teams, such as product mangement, content design, and engineering to continuously deliver features based on the project roadmap.
As of 2024, this product has been released. View details here.
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