Clinician Portal
Mission
To develop a digital therapeutics web portal to support clinicians in treating brain injury.
Project Summary
Brain injury and the recovery journey are largely invisible. While patients may receive good care in the hospital, they are sent home to recover on their own.
Digital therapeutics support the patient, as he or she navigates the recovery journey between clinical visits. In turn, Neurovine provides clinicians with data to make personalized, informed medical decisions for their patient.
The project goal was to design a web portal that would act as a central repository for this data. Ultimately, we envisioned a portal that allows the clinician to report, prescribe and track a patient’s recovery with clarity and confidence.
Company
Neurovine is a med-tech start up that uses AI and machine learning to provide better recovery support to both patients and clinician who are grappling with brain injury.
Project Date
Design phase : Winter/Spring 2022
Development phase: Current
My role
I worked on this project as a lead designer within a cross-functional team.
My main areas of responsibility:
-Research and testing : patients and clinicians
- Head up brainstorm sessions
-Information architecture and content design.
-Wireframes / prototyping
-Metrics in Mixpanel
-Some user interface design
My Challenge
Currently, the standard of care for brain injuries remains disjointed and incomplete. This leaves clinicians grappling for a reliable source of information. A web portal would aggregate information from various inputs and facilitate a clinician’s decision making.
Neurovine’s data scientists provided me with the metrics indicative of recovery. My challenge, as a designer, was to translate this complex data into a clear and actionable user experience for clinicians.
How might we empower clinicians to do their job better by arming them with evidence-based insights?
My Solution
Here is how I tackled the problem:
RESEARCH
Context study : patients in recovery and clinicians in practice
Identify user pain points
Competitive audit : look at electronic medical records (EMRs) for similarities and gaps.
IDEATION
Flow chart : insights and MVP
Information Architecture : site map
Patient - clinician interactions
Patient - app interactions
FEEDBACK
Stakeholder reviews
Field testing
Designer critiques
Mixpanel : planned metrics on for engagement and retention
Final Designs
Research
I started by shadowing physiotherapists to gain a better understanding of their process. I asked what they wished for in our product.
“We receive mostly subjective data from our patients and that’s hard to go on”.
“We don’t have time for charting. We barely have time to glance at the patient's file”.
Then, I conducted a competitive analysis to understand how a portal could complement current EMRs. Strategically, Neurovine would do better to complement industry standards rather than compete with or replace them.
I compiled these learnings into a report and shared with the team. It was essential to align as we inched forward.
Next, I thought about how patients and clinicians connect. If we wanted to innovate, we needed to identify opportunities for improvement.
“How do patients currently communicate with their care providers?”
“What possibilities do digital therapeutics offer us?”
Goalpost
We needed a repository that aggregates data from a variety of inputs.
And it needed to be view-only, since clinicians neither like nor have the time for charting.
Iteration
I couldn’t dream up a portal on my own. I needed a cross-functional team of data scientists, software engineers, and the CMO.
So I called a series of brainstorming sessions and presented my research findings.
Together, the team developed content and sketches.
This was followed by many rounds of iterations and experiments.
Goalpost
Simple: the portal will present data in simple graphs.
Quick: the data needs to be basic - that is, we will omit data that requires back-end calculation, like “trends and averages”.
The designs were coming together.
Luckily for us, at this juncture, a seasoned UI designer joined the team. We divided the labour; she established the UI (colours, shapes) and defined the graphs.
I designed the home page, about us, and tech overview pages.
While we all had many ideas to add to the project, I reminded the team that we were aiming for an MVP - or a minimum viable project. This meant we agreed to cut certain features and placed them in the backlog for future versions.
Next, I was ready to validate our assumptions. We met with clinicians and asked for feedback.
We heard from several clinicians that they wanted a single graph connecting activities to triggers. This insight causes us to discard previous pages and come up with this page to the right.
The clinician select an activity from the dropdown menu and sees the graph populate with associated symptoms that are caused by this activity.
Final Reflections
As the design phase came to a close, I reflect on the results. The designs had been reviewed by clinicians; and their input resulted in iterations. Now, software is building designs. Once complete, I plan for user testing in real-world clinical settings.
In a nutshell, here is what I take away:
Know the value of an MVP: while it’s a designer’s job to push the envelope, it’s important to remember to “test early and test often”. Keeping to an MVP allows for just that.
Teamwork is the dreamwork: Medtech design is very collaborative. Listening, humility and flexibility are key to pursuing good science supported by good design.
Be strategic: Yes, it’s tempting to want to showcase one’s creative chops, but we need to keep business goals and practicality in mind.
Click through the full prototype here.
