Cerner: Mobile App Patient Portal
Summary
Healthcare is a hot topic, and each day users want more and more proactive ways to keep in touch with their health. I was tasked with leading my team to create a healthcare patient portal that would give users access to the health information they want to see in an intuitive format.
Goals
Our team wanted to create a user-friendly health care experience for parents of small children who experience "pop-up" medical issues. Parents should be able to quickly schedule appointments amidst their busy lives and receive detailed reports of their visits in just a few clicks.
How did we get here?
We didn't start off with our user group of busy parents, we went through a variety of user groups based on our research before we made the final decision.
Much of our initial research was figuring out the common experiences using patient portals, what types of people are using patient portals, and the main goals patient portals try to accomplish.
Hey that's me!
Secondary research can only take you so far though, so we also interviewed anyone we could get out hands on that wanted to talk about their experience using patient portals.
This was data based off of about 20 different people.
We found that the current patient portal experience was anything but holistic. Many of our interviewees stated that they would only use their patient portals to schedule appointments, check pre/post-appointment, and to check vaccination status. We decided to focus on those most used aspects and improve on them as best as we could.
Many of these sketches focus on the messaging, scheduling, and medical record access parts of a patient portal.
User Group
Throughout the project, we considered a number of different user groups to focus on, but in the end we decided upon the busy parent as this was a user we had access to and also seemed to be one of the general primary users of patient portals based on our research. To kick things off, we created a user story to help us understand our user a little bit better.
One morning, Charlie wakes up with an earache. It's so painful that Charlie doesn't want to get out of bed.
Sam calls of work and Charlie’s school. He then calls the doctor to schedule an appointment for later that day.
During the appointment, Sam feels stressed about Charlie's health and is also overwhelmed trying to remember all the information the doctor is giving.
After the appointment, Sam is given a paper copy of the appointment summary. The busyness of everyday life leads to it being misplaced and for Sam to be confused about how to take care of Charlie.
Sam’s busy schedule also creates more anxiety and distractions about reminding Charlie to take his medication daily.
Because of the current system, Sam is left stressed, overwhelmed, and distracted.
This helped us identify some of the pain points our user may have, allowing us to design ways that alleviate those pain points. This led us to a few overarching goals which are as follows:
Streamline the Process of Appointments
Help Parents Care for Their Child
Provide Parents with Useful Aftercare Summaries
With these goals we had a clear path moving forward, allowing us to start prototyping and testing.
The Prototype Journey
Based loosely off our sketches, these were among the first batch.
Per usual, designs need to be tested in order for us to find their shortcomings. We decided upon a light scenario testing to test flow, along with basic interview questions to test visual appeal.
Through our testing, our users had a lot to say about the waiting process before their appointment, describing it as one of the more stressful parts of the journey. Consequentially they wanted to see more attention to it in our solutions.
This set focuses on actions parents can perform before and after their child's appointment.
As for the other parts of our app, we found that many of our features were intuitive enough for users and were often pleased with the experience of finding the information that they wanted. With this in mind we made a few minor tweaks and gave everything a new coat of paint before we cam upon our final designs.
Vaccinations and Medical Records sections respectively
Reflection
This project came with a number of external problems regarding a smaller team size than expected, but that being said we were able to come together to create a solution that met many of our standards given the couple short months we had to design. This was one of my first experiences being a leader on a large team, and served as a good learning experience for me in more ways than one. Overall I was pleased with the work that we produced and hope to apply what I learned in the future.
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