Integrated Care Management
Designing a Care Management tool for clinical Users
Challenge: How might we provide tools for clinical care teams to coordinate and improve outcomes for their most sick patients?
My Contribution: Partnered on research and strategy, and lead the interaction and visual design
Team: User Experience Designer (Me!), Strategic Design Researcher, Product Manager, Software Architect, and three Software Developers
Skills Used: User interviewing, workflow design, brainstorming & sketching, rapid prototyping, interaction design, visual design
The Care Plan vision
The Problem
The healthcare system supports all kinds of patients. It is currently extraordinarily costly and physicians aren’t incentivized correctly.
How does Care Management help? Care management is a set of activities intended to improve patient care and reduce the need for costly medical services by improving coordination of care, eliminating duplication, and helping patients and caregivers more effectively manage health conditions. These efforts have demonstrated potential to improve quality and control costs for patients with complex conditions.
Care Management must be seamlessly integrated within the much broader context of a medical practice in order to lower costs while improving patient outcomes.
Until this project, athenahealth didn’t offer care management tools for clinicians.
Research
Co-led 15 user interviews
Shadowed users on 4 site visits
Participated in and facilitated countless brainstorms
Led 4 design sprints
Users revealed revealed significant opportunities across all workflow steps.
At a high-level, care managers need to keep track of patients who require attention, without having to dig for information (i.e. awareness of recent hospital stays or who is out of range)
Design Challenge
Designing the Optimal Workflow
The foundational place to start designing was the ‘Care Management Event.’
Exploration through Design Sprints
I created multiple high-fidelity prototypes and conducted user feedback sessions in order to iterate on our proposed solutions.
Alpha Released Product
Results
Our team faced resourcing and geo-location coordination challenges throughout this project our collaboration enabled us to yield impressive results.
The alpha has gone live with over 114 clients.
There have been over 12,000 Care Plans created for our clients most sick patients. This means that roughly 1% of our patients have a Care Plan.
The biggest opportunity that our alpha uncovered was the need for additional features to round-out the Care Plan we created. The main constraint for our teams throughout this project has been limited technical resources and our multitude of priorities.
Next Steps
Our next steps are to incorporate alpha feedback into the current design. We hypothesized that there would be some latency with Care Plan building as doctors continued to see their patients over time. We’re expecting 5% of patients to have a Care Plan by July 2019.