The Challenge
Design an application that allows the user to effectively schedule and manage clinical tasks.
Scope
Task scheduling for Nurse Practitioners and Care Coordinators at a specific clinic.
Problem
Nurses on staff continually see patients and fill out orders for imaging and labs. They do not have an effective way to collaborate with their care coordinators and confirm that appointment, imaging, and lab scheduling are done for all of the patients that they see on a daily basis.
Goal
Enhance the user experience for NPs and care coordinators by designing a standalone task management mobile application.
Constraints
Build IOS and Android mobile applications with an Ionic framework utilizing an angular codebase.
User Research
While brainstorming for this product, I ran into the issue of not knowing how to fairly assign tasks to clinic coordinators. In order to combat this issue, I came up with two ideas:
- Having nurses assign all tasks to a lead coordinator who would, in turn, distribute those tasks amongst the care coordinators.
- Assigning specific coordinators to each nurse that work solely with those nurses
Next, I interviewed a couple of friends that work as clinic coordinators at the Clinics and Surgery Center in order to see their perspective and gain some insight from it.
Based on their suggestions, I came up with this assumption:
- A few coordinators are assigned to each nurse, based on rotating shifts.
- Each nurse has a main coordinator that primarily works with them, allowing them to effectively assign all their tasks to that person.
- Since each coordinator also has other back-up nurses that they work with due to possible shift changes and moments of unavailability, they get the tasks from those other nurses re-assigned to them whenever it is necessary.
- There is a lead coordinator that oversees everything, handles issues, and leads strategy implementations and quality assurance metrics.
Next Steps:
- Suggest these potential implementations to the client
- Further conduction of user research
User Flows
Process
Using those flow charts, I made sketches of what the application could look like in my notebook, then turned them into wireframes with Balsamiq.
Wireframes
Final Considerations
- Usage of filters to add high priority tasks to the top of the list
- Presentation of wireframes to the client in order to make adjustments based on their suggestions
- Creation of visual designs, suited to the client’s requests
- Incorporation of user testing on the wireframes and designs