My role: UX Research & UI Design
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Team: Maria Fernandez, Diana Alayon
Meghan Plunkett, Christina Smith
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My key tasks: Generative Research, Evaluative Research, wireframing, Interface Design, Prototyping.
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Timeline: Hackathon project -24h-
Covid-19
Healthcare
Assistant
An introduction
About the project
Covid- 19 healthcare assistant is a mobile app that allows to help patients and nurses with rapid tests and to avoid congestions in hospitals. I was responsible for the end to end process from generative research to prototyping.
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The problem
Hospitals are very congested these days due to Covid-19 pandemic. Nurses struggle to attend patients that are coming to the hospital in critical condition, those who have mild symptoms and would like to get a rapid test and also attend people on the phone
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The project goal
The goal is to create a mobile app to help ease congestion at the hospitals and to be able to offer the best service to every patient.
Understanding the problem space
What are the challenges that nurses face when hospital are congested?
We conducted ten surveys and three interviews with two nurses and one doctor to understand their needs and pain points when hospitals are overcrowded.
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The major questions we asked here were:
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- What has your hospital improved during this pandemic?
- Could an app speed up the current process? How?
- What is the step by step process when a patient arrives?
- What are the biggest challenges you face when you check in patients?
- Is there any frustrations by the way is run?
- If the answer is yes… which one?
- How does Health Insurance affect this process?
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Here are the main pain points that healthcare workers faced:
Patients are coming to get tested
at the same time
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Overcrowded hospitals
We need to separate in different
floors those patients with Covid-19
and those who don't have the virus
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Need to shield patients
We can't attend everyone properly
because we are overflowed with
phone calls
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Overflowed with phone calls
We need an app that will help us
organise testing between colleagues
and shifts
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Better organisations between
shifts
Exploration
What are the potential features based on the main pain points?
We created a user persona and empathy map to determine potential features. This was also an opportunity for us to further understand their needs and gather insights from what was not explicitly mentioned.
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Insight and possible features:
- Traffic light system to attend patients
- Patients can do their own screenings within the app to determine if they need to book a test or go to the hospital
- Nurses can accommodate patients in designated rooms with the app
- App will alert nurses in what stage of the process every patient is
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How are similar services designed and how can our app differentiate?
We didn't have direct competitors because this has been a unique worldwide situation.
We decided that we needed to create an app that is easy to use and resolves clutters in hospitals.
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Ideating
Main features
Based on the insights from the generative research, surveys, the personas, and interviews, we further refined the features for the minimum viable product.
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- Create two different user interfaces within the app:
We wanted to make sure that potential patients could check their symptoms at home and book a test if need it. On the other hand we knew that nurses needed to have a system to do the testing and assign patients into hospital if it was required.
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- Classified symptoms :
Citizens were getting misinformed by the media about Covid-19 early symptoms. We aimed to create a screener with the exact signs of infection to make the testing more proficient.
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- Traffic light system:
This system will help nurses and doctors to attend patients depending on the infection's severity.
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Testing iterations
Ideating for possible solutions
We created several sketches for MVP based on the features we wanted to implement. Every one us designed few screens and we voted them out.
After the vote, we decided on the design system and we started with the high-fidelity prototype
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Designing high-fidelity prototype
Proposed solutions
Part 1
Pre- screening at home
Patients can check their symptoms at home and determine if they need to book a test.
This system will avoid clutters in hospitals
Part 2
Traffic light system
After the pre-screening potential patients would receive an alert regarding their low - medium or high risk to have contracted the virus and prompted them to book an appointment if needed.
Part 3
Book appointment
If it is determined that you are medium or high risk you will be prompted to book a date for a swab test
Part 4
Prioritize patients
With this system, nurses are able to get and
send results quickly. This method will help me to update patients about their results and assigned them a room if it is needed.
Feedback
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We submitted the project to the judges and the feedback was very valuable to the team.
Out of 40 projects that were submitted we were awarded with a Honorary Special Mention from the judges along with these comments:
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- Key differentiator: "I like that this project aims to solve problems from both the patient and provider side. What stood out for me is the decision to try to solve more upstream on how to triage before patients even come in".
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- "A nice touch on the self check-in to include a reference number to potentially verify identity".
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- "Really like how you organized the information presented to the nurse; having the ability to see "high risk" is very helpful"
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- Nice work on the pre-screening experience for the patient
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- I like the screening to triage who comes to get tested in the first place
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- "Health care providers see all details of a patient’s pre-screening prior to even seeing them." Really like the framing of how you approach solving the problem.
