An EHR Cloud-based health care system

By Hashim Irfan Ali M

[email protected]

Introduction

As part of a Design hackathon, I had to design an EHR product for the doctors, patients, and other verticals of healthcare which is similar to other EMR products such as appointment management, billing, and inventory to enable clinics to digitalize to bring in more efficiency and effectiveness.

I always felt health care designs are pretty much outdated and didn’t focus much on digital experience aligned to doctors. Here’s the opportunity to change that and yes, let’s get started on how did I approach this problem.

What is Mould?

Mould is an example of a digital platform that can provide a potential solution. Their software is designed to meet the needs of an entire practice with their patient registration and medical transcription solutions. These services can be easily integrated with any practice management software or electronic health record system to make administrative workflows more simple, quick, and efficient. Mould design process includes extensive user research followed by visual design. As a UI/UX team member, I had the chance to design the product wireframes to effectively showcase Mould’s features and help contribute to this much-needed digital transformation in healthcare.

Problem Statement

In the current scenario, doctors at clinics and hospitals write on paper and there’s no proper tracking of medicines prescribed to patients. Doctors have to rewrite the same prescriptions to multiple patients several times triggering an inefficiency factor. Also, small clinics don’t have proper systems in place right from booking appointments to managing inventory. Given the unorganized way of operating, there is a serious need for the clinics to move to cloud-based online systems from the traditional offline systems.

The Research

Understanding how to provide optimal features for Mould's services required conducting surveys and interviews to learn about potential users and what they were looking for.

1. Card Sorting: Card sorting was done to understand the priority features to doctors and what’s important for them to bring an integrated solution to the clinics. Also, what’s missing in the current EHR applications.
2. Formal User Interviews: We wanted to create a standard way of consultations and wanted to push the standards through our solutions, so we figured out how a consultation can be classified and so on. One more important goal was to understand the level of interaction with digital products.
3. Observation: One of the best ways to understand doctors’ behaviors and the way they currently do their consultations. There are plenty of scopes to validate ideas in this way and worked like a magic for us.

Competitive Landscape

We started by doing general research about holistic healthcare practices and informing ourselves about their benefits. We later moved on to doing a very detailed comparative and competitive analysis. From all of the platforms, we encountered the most relevant common denominators with the criteria.

Ideation

After completing our research, we began planning our design decisions using an affinity diagram, which would later lead to the creation of target user personas and journey maps. We gathered our survey and interview data points and began to search for emerging patterns and trends.

When it came to medical transcription, we found that there was an even split between medical information being transcribed directly by the attending medical professional, an external transcriptionist, and software. The only option not being used by our respondents was internal transcriptionists. From this, we were able to confirm that there is indeed a market for transcription software in healthcare settings, with a third of respondents already using it.

Here are the wants and needs of our doctors at a very high-level overview: