CASE STUDY 1
Project Overview
Two apps in both native iOS and Android supported by a Web Dashboard for visitor logistics.
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Duration: 5 months Company: Ascension Technologies
My Role:
UX and UI Design
QA Analyst
Presentation
Problem Statement
In order for family members to view their family member's surgery status and be available to talk to the surgeon during or after surgery, they must remain in the surgical waiting room and read updates from a centrally located large LCD screen on the room's wall.
Surgeons:
• Do not have a digitized version of the daily surgery schedule.
• Are not notified that surgery is delayed or can begin early.
• Are not aware of their patient's location in pre-op and post-op.
• Navigation within the St. John Hospital & Medical Center (SJH&MC) is difficult for patients and visitors.
• Service recovery is not being accomplished just in time while the visitor is in the waiting area.
• There is no ability to survey visitors about their experience with Surgical Services.
User Flow
The user flow of the effort comprised of two main parts: (1) set up a family member as the gatekeeper of their loved one's care while inpatient/outpatient; (2) Be able to follow in real-time where their loved one was in the surgery lifecycle process, and communication between them and the performing surgeon.
Hypothesis
The main driver of the entire project was that the chief surgeon of the hospital wanted a way to not only track their daily surgeries, but also to be able to have a more efficient communications channel with family members. By creating an Android, iOS and Web admin set of applications, we felt that this should be adequate coverage to achieve both of these primary objectives.
How We Accomplished The Challenge
While we had a lot of inside inputs for the buildout of the MY OR app due the chief surgeon of the hospital being a key contributor to what we included in the app, we had to replicate the waiting room experience for patients’ loved ones. This included everything from general information which was posted to a monitor in the waiting room to more sensitive information about patient status and situation.
In order to keep a high level of security about patients, we also had to develop a web dashboard which allowed us to capture a loved one’s contact info and it also provided an authentication model.
To get a better idea of how the loved one experience was at the time, we visited the hospital including the waiting room and Help Desk. The Help Desk team was pivotal in setting up the users of the OR Update app via the web dashboard. We also looked into the experience of visitors who may not be very familiar with the hospital and included a basic hospital/parking set of maps.
Design Impact
The introduction of the apps and web dashboard met the deliverables as requested by the hospital, our funder. The OR Update app, which has been freely available to the general public on the Google Play Store was available until 2023, some 6 years after its release. With the combination of the Web Dashboard and the OR Update app, the hospital was able to free up loved ones from having to monitor activities directly in the hospital’s waiting room.
Demos
Here is a set of prototype demonstrations to provide details about how all three of the apps worked. We'll start with the My OR app, which was explicitly for the hospital's chief and other participating surgeons. The Web Dashboard was built to add patients' loved ones into the future communications pipeline. Once their account was established via the hospital's Waiting Room desk, they could download the OR Update app and log in with the provided credentials. The app allowed them to monitor surgery activities and get any texts from the surgeon for potential on-the-spot consults.
Lessons Learned
My OR App
In building out the iOS/Android versions of the application, here are some of the lessons learned:
• Response times for answers to questions from the Chief surgeon were typically very long and made it challenging to keep the project on schedule.
• Response times for answers to questions from the Chief surgeon were typically very long and made it challenging to keep the project on schedule.
• UAT Process: Perform a more rigorous regiment of testing and bring in a QA Analyst for the duration of testing.
Web Dashboard and OR Update App
Based on how the authentication process was setup, it is suggested having a full-circle authentication process developed, tested and in place that requires only one visit by the user to the Waiting Room front desk. Password changes would happen from the device at any time (24/7) and would last more than 24 hours.
With the UAT process, perform a more rigorous regiment of testing and bring in a QA Analyst for the duration of testing.