Duration: Apr - Sep 2022
Team: Mengzhe Ye, Nuoran Chen, Bing Liu, Jiayuan Wang, Anyi Li (PM),
My Roles & Responsibilities: User Research & Analysis, User Flow, Information Architecture, Wireframing, Prototyping, Coordinating with Developers
Service Ecology
- Cancer Care
When it comes to radiotherapy (RT) treatment, the patient's electronic health records play a crucial role. Approximately half of the cancer patients undergo RT treatment (a process that utilizes advanced algorithms and machinery to deliver precise radiation to the specific target area). During this process, doctors must carefully examine their patients' profiles to create personalized treatment plans. To come up with the final treatment plan, there are three stakeholders involved: oncologists, physicists, and therapists. They need to consult each others' notes and then make precise decisions.
In Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, there is a complex network of interactions, relationships, and experiences that are involved in delivering the cancer treatment plan to each patient. The RT treatment involves three stakeholders - oncologists, physicists, and therapists, each with distinct requirements for the patient's records.
Problem
The hospital is utilizing an excessive number of internal systems, which creates an unfriendly and complex environment for doctors when reviewing patient information. Additionally, the lack of efficient communication always caused some information delays about patients' treatment progress. Doctors often feel challenged when they have to spend over 35 minutes to collecting patients' histories and reading patients' health records.
Solution
Since the client, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center(MSK) is currently developing the new patient information system - WRAP, some portion of the backend and data have been integrated into for the purpose of automating the RT workflow. As the design team, we proposed an integrated patient information dashboard that could provide a comprehensive overview of a patient's health status, including medical history, current medications, lab results, and more. This can help doctors make more informed decisions about treatment and care.
Impact
5min
AVERAGE VIEW TIME
The time spent on reading the patient records reduced from 45mins to 3 mins.
5+
AVERAGE DIAGNOSIS RATE
The radiation specialists can diagnose and identify high-risk patients much faster.
My Contribution
I collaborated with 6 team members to develop a patient insight dashboard that assists the entire cancer care team in gathering information and promoting communication among practitioners from different departments.
➯
I translated research findings into actionable feature concepts based on tests and conducted semi-structured interviews with 6 interviewees.
➯
I created user flows, wireframes, mockups, and prototypes that promoted more flexibility, control, and efficiency for cancer care practitioners.
➯
I worked with the developer team to design and prototype through regular design reviews and organized several design sprints to align the design expectations.
Secondary Research
Competitor
Analysis
I started by identifying who our primary competitors and there are three main competitors: Phlips, Elekta, RO Dynamics and Varian. I delved deeper into the features and capabilities of their products and created a comparison about their strengths and weakness.
Primary Research
Interview
We created the interview protocols and conducted interviews with three subject matter experts and three target users.
We prioritized three research questions:
Q1
Identify the reason for the inefficiency when concluding patients' treatment process
Q2
Understand the specific types of patient information that a cancer care team would typically prioritized.
Q3
Analyze the radiotherapy (RT) treatment process and workflow of team collaboration and how the entire health care team communicates.
Throughout the conversation, we realized the RT treatment process is like a "relay race".
A group of three experts carefully examines various documents pertaining to a patient, and collaboratively makes decisions regarding their care. Once their assessments are complete, the case is passed on to the next specialist for further evaluation.
Synthesis
To better understand the process, we utilized the experience map to identify key stages and users' actions throughout the process of RT treatment and what types of the patients' health record they need.
After gathering all the information, we synthesized user data to create three personas. This helped us understand the expectations and motivations of each role during the RT treatment process.
Insights
After conducting user interviews and reviewing secondary literature on cancer care team workflows, we compiled our research findings:
➯
Data Fragmentation: The hospital is utilizing an excessive number of internal systems, which creates an unfriendly and complex environment for doctors when reviewing patient information.
➯
Information Accessibility: Practitioners from different departments requires different types of information about the patient. However, not all necessary information may be easily or quickly accessible to all team members, which can lead to inefficiencies and delays.
➯
Time Consumption: Health care practitioner find it is hard to locate patients' info at the limited time. It is time-consuming to switch and access all of the necessary information for various patients profiles.
How might we create a patient insight dashboard for the RT treatment team to more efficiently navigate, access and evaluate different patients’ past and current data based on their specific roles?
Brainstorm
After conducting primary and secondary research, we created various design artifacts to refine our problem and brainstormed solutions. Through iterations of storyboards and speed dating, we narrowed down our solution of dashboard. We decided to combine some features like interactive imaging results graph, patient profile list, Intuitive PDF reader.
Information
Architecture
Based on the patient's raw data provided, I developed the information architecture (IA) that could efficiently organize and analyze the significance of patient data that is provided. After having the conversations with development team, we collected some insightful feedbacks and finalized the IA structure.
Layout Exploration
After built the information architecture for the patient insight dashboard, we then moved on to work iteratively to develop different versions of the dashboard design based on the information structure.
The reasons why we chose this direction because:
✔
A smooth navigation to switch between diverse patient profiles.
✔
Tab system allows switch between historical documents and current records.
✔
A tool bar helps to efficiently organize and navigate through a large number of files.
User Testings
We then conducted the 10 structured interviews to test our our lo-fi wireframes.
I summarized the interviews results to the below user feedbacks.
The current default view only show minimal report details. Practitioners want to read more treatment related information in the dashboard.
Practitioners suggest that the patient list panel takes too much space in the dashboard, but they usually don't switch patient profiles back and forth.
Practitioners suggest searching, filtering and prioritizing patients' data is difficult due to information overload on the dashboard.
Iteration
Then we moved to the ideation phase, I created multiple wireframes and tested them with practitioners in MSK to ensure the features we identified will deliver value. As we developed our final design, we conducted 10 user testings and consolidated the users' feedback. Then we update our design versions of key features.
Design Challenge 01 - Redesign of RT Report Screen Reader
Some users have reported that they would like to see more detailed information about the RT report in the default view, as they feel the current information is too minimal. They have also expressed concern that the toolbar and progress bars are taking up too much space.
🤯
Chance of flips and errors during work since it is against Fitts’ law.
🤯
Split screen causes the information overload.
😊
Similar to users’ habits of other reading application.
Design Challenge 02 - A drop-down patient list to switch multiple patient
Practitioners suggested patient list occupy a significant amount of space on the dashboard seems unnecessary and impractical. Therefore, it might be worthwhile to consider optimizing the dashboard layout by minimizing the space allocated to the patient list.
🤯
Difficult to search with profile images.
🤯
Hard to navigate through the banner.
😊
Concise and clear.
Design Challenge 03 - Key Indicator and Notification Center
Practitioners mentioned that the information in the dashboard is overwhelming, making it challenging for them to access valuable patient data like risk factors.
🤯
Floating Notification bar interfere with the usability of the user interface.
🤯
The presence of a floating toolbar reduces the available screen space.
😊
Highlight critical patients’ medical record and deliver timely updates.
Design System
Based on the patient's raw data provided, I developed the information architecture (IA) that could efficiently organize and analyze the significance of patient data that is provided. After having the conversations with development team, we collected some insightful feedbacks and finalized the IA structure.
Final Design
In addition to creating a mockup, I worked closely with our developers in creating the final product and the current design has been implemented in the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Report Tab
Help practitioners to easily switch and compare different types of report
Patient List
Collapsible Patients’ profile panel could be more flexible while navigating in the dashboard
Indicator and Notification Center
Highlight critical patients’ medical record and deliver timely updates of the treatment process
Dark Mode
Highlight critical patients’ medical record and deliver timely updates of the treatment process
Take Aways
Through my experience collaborating with a cancer care team, I gained a deeper appreciation for the significance of understanding the mental models of users. In our discussions, we uncovered that practitioners possess diverse responsibilities and place a high value on working together. The goal of the patient insight dashboard is to simplify the work flow and provide a clearer patient data structure. While I created the information architecture, I realized the structured patient data system guided our future design and became an efficient communication tool when discussing with various stakeholders.
