background
Our company was contracted to work with a startup in the healthcare field dedicated to fighting the opioid crisis and other forms of substance addiction.
They needed software for the opening of their clinic in six weeks, without having hired their first engineer. The main focus was the delivery of the product while hiring progressed.
Goals of the Project
Build custom software to support the product goals across care management, logistics, and reporting.
Build a team focused on developing high quality software, quickly, in a highly regulated environment
The Challenge
The most immediate need was to capture responses to the over 26 clinical assessment questionnaires in a structured way to allow for data-driven insights that can eventually inform the way that the clinic, and the healthcare industry at large, combat substance abuse.
With the first clinic opening in six weeks, our team was under a tight deadline.
Questionnaire Audit
The list of priority questionnaires we started with changed drastically in quantity and complexity. After an initial review of the questionnaires, I saw there were patterns and recommended identifying the components and creating a library of design patterns.
Due to our lean product practice and componentized design choices, we were able to rapidly reprioritize and always jump on the most important thing.
Responsive Design
Through interviews with the clinicians, we understood that they mostly work on computers, but they wanted the possibility of clients to be able to fill out surveys themselves on a tablet. I designed the questionnaire interactions with mobile first in mind.
Reduce Administrative Churn
Through our interviews, we understood that clinicians value talking and interacting with their clients. The time they spend manually transferring information from paper questionnaires to excel spreadsheets to an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) takes away from that important interaction.
It was important that our tool not contribute to more churn, or clinicians wouldn’t use it. But in six weeks, it was improbable that we would be able to integrate with the EMR.
Our solution was to allow for the results to be easily downloaded or copied from one application to another. We tested our ideas using a prototype and Kano model questions to identify must-haves. While the copy/paste function was acceptable, it was clear future work would need to include an integration with the EMR.
Results
In less than three weeks, the team had valuable, user-friendly software that the clinic could use in production. Investing time in code quality up front, as well as making extensible design choices, allowed us to iterate quickly.
By the end of the six-week engagement, the users had all of their required questionnaires, and the data was captured in a structured way that allowed for reporting and analytics.