HospicePro
What is HospicePro?
HospicePro is an intuitive solution created for hospice professionals by hospice experts who understand the needs of care teams, patients and their loved ones. Developed as an easy-to-use, all-inclusive system, HospicePro significantly reduces the amount of time spent on paperwork, data entry, scheduling, claim submissions and more. HospicePro will help ensure compliance and maximize efficiency so you deliver the greatest comfort to your patients.
HospicePro helps you do more with fewer resources. We understand that the ever-evolving regulatory and payment requirements continue to stretch hospice organizations which take focus away from the individuals in their care.
Overview
Our world has been radically transformed by digital technology – smart phones, tablets, and web-enabled devices have transformed our daily lives and the way we communicate. Medicine is an information-rich enterprise.
A greater and more seamless flow of information within a digital health care infrastructure, created by electronic health records (EHRs), encompasses and leverages digital progress and can transform the way care is delivered and compensated. With EHRs, information is available whenever and wherever it is needed, practicing efficiencies and cost savings, increasing patient participation and improving patient care, care coordination and diagnostics and patient outcomes.
HospicePro is an intuitive solution created for hospice professionals by hospice experts who understand the needs of care teams, patients and their loved ones. Developed as an easy-to-use, all-inclusive system, HospicePro significantly reduces the amount of time spent on paperwork, data entry, scheduling, claim submissions and more. HospicePro will help ensure compliance and maximize efficiency so you deliver the greatest comfort to your patients.
Challenge
Design a quality, responsive online cloud-based software that is easy to use and provides hospice providers access to their patient data anytime, anywhere.
Whether integrating from paper charting or another EHR system, implementing a new EHR system comes with expected challenges for medical practices. It is important to keep in mind that using an EHR is not the goal of doctors and nurses. An EHR is useful for registering patient’s data and communicating orders, but their main purpose is to take care of patients, not extensive data entry.
Goals
The goal is to significantly decrease the amount of time care teams spend manually entering patient data into databases, so they can they spend more time with their patients.
It is essential that HospicePro offer unique, never-to-be seen features which sets our software apart from competitors in order to persuade agencies to migrate from their current systems to ours.
Research Goals
01
Extensively research all Medicare protocols in order to gain a better understanding of what features are required by the government in order to meet HIPAA compliant guidelines.
02
Conduct research for competitive market analysis on the leading Electronic Health Record software companies within the hospice space to gain insight on their strengths and weaknesses and capitalize on areas which need improvement.
03
Gain insight on which features hospice care providers need and want in an Electronic Health Record software in order consider a useful tool to adopt into their agencies.
Timeline
The complexity of this project will require up to 12-months to develop. The design process however, has been broken up into a total of ten weeks. By using a timeline, I’m able to stay on track and organized in order to meet deadlines and submit deliverables.
Primary Research
Healthcare is a very complex and information heavy. In order to understand user workflows and processes, I needed to first familiarize myself with compliancy requirements and government regulations. This part of the research was the most difficult to understand, as there are so many different layers and laws are constantly changing. It will be crucial for the development team to stay on top of new Medicare laws, and update the software accordingly in order to stay compliant.
Competitive Market
Competitive market research was much more of a challenge than anticipated since getting access to competitor software is limited without scheduling a live product demo with their sales team or purchasing the product. Since information was scarce, I took a different approach to collecting useful information on the competition by using a custom data table to collect all customer reviews rated 3-stars and less for each leading software on the market.
By collecting hundreds of online user reviews, I was able to identify patterns within the user complaints and comprised a list of the most requested features. In addition to learning which features were most requested, I also learned which features were the most complained about. As a completely new software in a very niche market, it was important to focus on designing new, innovative features never seen before to gain some advantages to those dominating the industry. Using the data table as a roadmap, the software was designed for the users, essentially by the users.
Persona Development
Maya is a Registered Nurse who’s worked in the healthcare industry for 25 years. She specializes in Hospice Care and has used many EHR software throughout her time. Documenting patient data is a huge part of her job, however, the industry lacks sufficient tools to get this task done efficiently. She loves what she does and hopes the industry creates a more user-friendly software so she could spend less time on data-entry and spend more time providing quality care to her patients.
Motivations
Patients are her passion and job is fulfilling despite the long hours and required overtime.
Needs
An improved EHR tool for her team to adapt to improve complex multidisciplinary workflows. More time with her patients and less time on data-entry.
Wants
A hospice specific EHR software which offers innovative features not seen before, as well as, one designed by hospice providers instead of tech firms.
User Flow Scenario
Allie just received a call from the caregiver to one of their hospice patients regarding a bad fall the patient had taken getting out of the shower. The caretaker is requesting a nurse from the patient’s care team visit immediately to assess the patient and care to any open wounds or injuries which may have been inflicted to the patient at the time of impact. Allie needs to login into her HospicePro account to document record of the call within the patient’s electronic medical chart by creating a communication note summarizing the conversation, the issue and request the assigned care team visit the patient immediately to assess the patient’s change in condition.
Sitemap
First Wireframes
I first tackled the most difficult part of the software – the patient card. This is where users will spend the majority of their time when using the product. The first and main challenge within this module was the navigation. Navigation needs to be easy, flexible and capable of accommodating an unlimited number of items.
Summary of Findings
After conducting some usability tests, I learned that the navigation had everything the team needed in order to perform their tasks, however, it was difficult to use because there were so many different options available. This feedback was extremely helpful, as it led me to create a new feature which allowed users the ability to search for an item within the navigation list, as well as each user the ability to customize their own navigation menus. By adding the search feature, users are no longer forced to guess where specific items are within the navigation, saving them time and frustration. Since hospice care teams are composed of many different disciplines, each performing different tasks within the software, it made sense to allow users to customize their navigation menu to essentially keep most used options at the top of their navigation to access much easier.
Brand Identity
Consistent Design
A key rule of user-centered design says that equal elements should look and work the same way. If there are elements that look alike, users expect them to mean and behave the same. This is valid for everything, from objects to apps, from urban to interactive design. Consistency applies to colors, typography, shapes, links, icons, menus, words, behaviors, and units of measure. Any variation from standards and customs has the risk of being misunderstood.
Any innovative design will have to be learned by users, based on their previous knowledge. On the one hand, consistent design is intuitive as it relies heavily on previous experiences and encourages learning. Inconsistent design, on the other hand, is hard to use and learn because it is counterintuitive, users are forced to constantly think about how a particular system works.
For users, if an app doesn’t behave like expected, it could lead to an inadvertent error. This is especially important in healthcare software, since errors could lead to life-threatening events. Given this situation, it is always convenient to design with human error in mind.
Design Style
Colors are vibrant against light backgrounds and dark text to provide the highest readability ratio. By providing consistency with main elements, the goal was to help clinicians work on the software efficiently and easily.
Safe Alerts
Although, we usually think that efficiency of use (reduction of the time and effort needed to perform tasks) is the most important usability value, that is not always the case. In healthcare, time is critical, but patient safety is even more important. Every designer, especially those working with critical systems have to take into account the application of Murphy’s Law to users’ behavior: if users can make a mistake, they will make it. They will commit it in the worst possible situation. And they will not be aware of it!
Alarms are a great tool to avoid risky situations for patients. However, too many alarms can cause fatigue among doctors and nurses, until they are finally ignored. They should be designed as a balanced system that prioritizes life-threatening actions over mild risks.
Prototype
HospicePro’s final prototype wasn’t too far off from my original design. The biggest changes pertained to adding or removing colors to specific areas and/or features and increasing text size for easier reading amongst users of all ages. Many new features were added based on feedback gathered from usability testing, as well as additional market research. With healthcare products, it’s important to stay on top of healthcare regulations and regularly develop innovative solutions to improve the multidisciplinary processes amongst healthcare providers.
Usability Testing
Ten participants actively working in the hospice industry were acquired to test the HospicePro prototype. After recording each of the participants feedback and analyzing the data closely, I was able to determine priority items which needed to be addressed prior to launching the software. Some of these priority items were adding color coded event types in the staff calendar, adding a feature to make it easier for users to navigate through the pages and search for a specific category and voice recordings for quicker patient visits and data entry.
Usability Findings
01
Total of ten volunteers for the test, eight woman and two men. Due to COVID-19, six out of 10 participants were observed remotely via Zoom screen sharing, while the remaining were observed in person.
02
Before performing each task, participants were asked to “think out loud” to get a better gauge of their user flow process.
03
Each participant was asked to complete the set of scenarios outlined in the Usability Test Plan.
04
Nine out of the ten participants successfully finished each scenario from start to finish without any errors or hiccups. One participant struggled and offered suggestions.
05
Feedback recorded from each participant and adjustments were made accordingly. Each participant agreed to test the prototype a second time since there was much room for improvement discovered during the first.
06
All ten participants successfully performed each scenario from start to finish without any issues.
Marketing Website
A responsive website designed to promote brand awareness and target specific audiences to increase online demand. The site consists of four main pages: landing page, about page, contact page and the user login page.
Future Development
A mobile app not reliant on wifi for connectivity will be the next development for HospicePro. Field nurses often visit patients in rural areas where wifi connection is limited. In order for HospicePro to be successful within the Hospice industry, it was important to create a mobile app, which isn’t reliant on internet connection in order for practitioners to access their patient data.
For the mobile app to work in real time, users would need to sign into the app using wifi prior to visiting their first patient and the app would automatically save and share any new recorded information to the browser-based instance.
Lastly, the mobile app only has a few key features available to keep field clinicians task-focused and prevent the app from lagging or crashing.
Final Thoughts
HospicePro is a complex software design and developed by the very healthcare professionals who will use the product everyday. Future development ideas would be to build out the voice dictation feature allowing users to record themselves during their patient visits and the software intuitively dictates the recording from speech-to-text directly into the assessment forms, essentially eliminating the need for staff to spend hours on data entry per visit everyday. Developing this feature would be huge for clinicians and would ultimately change the EHR game forever. Providing helpful tutorials and key hints throughout the software would be ideal for future builds as well.
In conclusion, HospicePro is a unique software with many innovative tools designed to improve the quality of care provided to hospice patients by first improving the way patient data is recorded by care teams. The biggest challenge from this study was understanding the healthcare requirements from Medicare and developing design features which met HIPAA compliance.
Check out a demo of the marketing website to the right, or check it out for yourself at the provided link below. Thanks for stopping by!
