Optimizing Caregiving for Nurses
Redesigning a legacy healthcare management platform in the US to reduce administrative tasks for nurses and doctors so that they can dedicate more time towards patient care.
Industry
Healthcare • Enterprise
Role
Lead UX Designer, Globant
4+ months
Expertise
UX Research + Design
Digital Transformation
Designing Care
The CTO of EXL wanted to redevelop their care management platform, CareRadius so that they could compete in a rapidly digitised industry.
The expectation was for designers to work closely with his product team to conduct research and co-create a substantially improved version of CareRadius.
That is why he funded a research program that covered 5 cities in the USA over 30 days, followed by a design + development program that went on for several months.
Researching healthcare
Researching healthcare is not easy, especially because of strict laws governing patient data privacy. For example, hospitals won't allow researchers to conduct interviews in their premises or access their systems in fear of being non-compliant.
Lucky for us, the Product Lead tapped into her network to get us time with 60+ nurses, 5 doctors and 10+ administrative staff in various hospitals across the USA.
Post the user interactions, we set up a pop-up studio in CareRadius' offices for the next 2 weeks to interact with their business, design and engineering teams. With them, we evaluated existing product flows and the product roadmap.
Just before our trip, we made a working prototype of one troublesome user flow. The idea was to use the prototype to spark conversation and help nurses overcome hestitation and fear of being non-compliant while sharing their thoughts with us. Along with this, it also helped us validate use-cases and improvement areas for the product.
Key Insights
Seniors averse to change
Senior nurses were averse to changes in the interface since they were already 'experts' in using the existing platform.
Difficulty in accessing patient records
Nurses complained about not being able to locate patient information quickly, especially when they were on calls or needed to view it in an emergency.
Data-entry delays
Entering and editing data directly into the system was cumbersome, so many nurses would first write the information on paper and then feed it into the system (resulting in a lot of time wastage).
Workload mismanagement
Hospitals were unable to correctly track utilisation of their nurses and hence led to them being either overworked or under-utilised.
Always catching up
The product team felt that they were not equipped to innovate and were always behind other players in their care management offerings.
Better utilisation of nurses
Decisions must be made in a timely manner to accommodate clinical urgencies. We designed new flows so that nurses were more likely to meet timeliness requirements of their organisations and ultimately deliver care to patients on time.
Care NXT
We helped the product team envision the future of the healthcare management industry to come up with ideas to prepare CareRadius for the future.
Some ideas that were discussed: using AI to anticipate patient needs and help them self-serve issues before approaching nurses, using conversational UI to respond to patient inquiries, better integrations with hospital ERP software and tools etc.
Elevating the product to a platform
We envisioned a system architecture that is modular and flexible to cater to different needs of various hospitals and other tools they might use. We achieved this through:
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Reimagined user journeys to enable better navigation and their performance. E.g. fields and content can be customised without the help of IT teams.
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Improved visual design system that enables users to differentiate actions from static content while being compliant with W3C accessibility standards.
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Outcomes
Utilisation turnaround time
95%
Meeting target turnaround times increased to 95% for utilisation management
Increase in customer engagement
27%
Engagement improved by 27%. For specifically chronic disease management, it improved by 38%
Number of customers gained
18%
The companies who use CareRadius platform increased to 116 in one year after launch
Our research and redesign efforts created great value for EXL. Our team was awarded with a 9.1 CSAT (customer satisfaction score) for the collaborative and innovative approach that we took for the programme.