Cureatr
You are probably wondering how to pronounce that. Its cure-ate-r. Like curator.
Who was I? I was the UI/UX designer, I was responsible for research, hosting worshops, refining the actual designs, and usability studies with pharmacists.
What is this? A health tech startup, we specialize in comprehensive medication reviews for patients called via a platform called Meds360. I have been with Cureatr for almost 2 years, collaborating with developers, designers, project managers, data scientists, clinicians, and pharmacists.
Pharmphrases
What is it? Pharmphrases was a concept based on an excel sheet our clinicians maintained. Our pharmacists would often give similar recommendations and notes about medication to multiple patients with similar ailments. To reduce time spent typing this advice out, they created a shared excel sheet with the recommendations per medication.
Why is it important? The excel sheet was prone to errors, there were multiple users in one excel sheet, and little central maintenance. Our pharmacists needed to ditch the excel sheet and have the phrases accessible in our Meds360 platform to deliver care efficiently, give accurate advice, and learn from each other.
Our Challenge
Our pharmacists are manually copying and pasting phrases based on the medication from a decentralized excel sheet into the text fields of our platform.
Charting takes too long. Charting is a huge driver of PharmD time & thus costs.
Users are toggling between systems. Extra steps & mental capacity.
To increase patient visit margin of 40% by decreasing average time cost of MRP service. (our standard service)
What is our hypothesis?
Embedding the Clinic's Smart Phrases directly into Meds360 will help the Clinic document more efficiently by eliminating the need to copy and paste from an external sheet.
Minimizes staff frustration
Increases efficiency per patient call
Improves consistency & accuracy
Everyone is up to date with recommendations
What assumptions are we making about the users, environment, solution?
There are enough phrases and paragraphs that our Clinic routinely uses without editing within med list & MAP creation / documentation that justify automation
The Clinic needs to be able to maintain the SmartPhrases list independently without product/engineering assistance
(above) Smart Phrases is a massive excel our pharmacists used for documenting patient notes.
How will we measure success?
Reduced time spent documenting the patient chart
Interview & Shadow Clinicians
We next interviewed and shadowed clinicians — We watched how they interacted with the Smart Phrases excel sheet, asked questions about their interactions and timed each service they completed.
Make it stand out.
INTRODUCE YOUR BRAND
Pharmacists said they felt
Feels risky to interact with the Smart Phrases excel sheet, anyone can copy and paste over someone else’s work
Easily editable, and accessible
Familiar with navigation
No set workflow for updates and mass edits
We want our pharmacists to feel phrase management will be
Safe, the correct phrases will be copied
Forgivable, the phrases can be edited by the correct person
Maintained, properly and routinely
Analyze Current State
Competitive Analysis
For example, we wanted to understand how Epic or Oracle triggered a phrase. Below you will see a ‘.‘ (or period trigger) and an autopopulated field and how that would look in our platform, Meds360.
We took a look at other systems with similar features like Epic and Oracle. We wanted to understand how other tools embedded phrases or shortcuts into their system.
Trigger the phrase by a “.”
users will have to manually add each smartphrase to each box
more customization
could add the phrase anywhere the user is
Trigger the phrase by autopopulating the field (based on the previous user inputs)
this might be more structurally sound, more intentional
less customization to add a new smartphrase because of how pharmacist classify and add drugs is not always based on previous fields
harder to predict what is needed for each patient
Design
After speaking with clinicians, we renamed the feature to PharmPhrases (Smart Phrases was an Epic name feature name). I started by designing for:
How would our users interact with the trigger, and dropdown?
How would users edit, add, and delete phrases?
User Testing
I interviewed 2 pharmacists and set up design review time with 1 pharmacist.
Among the results, the key insights more mostly concerning the management flows:
Our initial organization of the drug and drug classes were not necessary. We provided lots of help or reminders about the drug classes, but were told that isn’t necessary since most pharmacists have the information memorized.
We also had to re-place our edit icon, there was some misunderstanding about what it served
Video 1: Inserting PharmPhrases into a field
Video 2: Utilizing Manage Pharmphrases
Users will select a phrase by typing “. “
Users can manage the phrases and recommendations using this modal.
Users can manage the phrases from any point in the platform view the universal Actions dropdown.
Developer Handoff
After making changes needed from the user testing. I created a developer specs to document the flow and process.
Personal Takeaways
Establishing Scope: At each stage of the process, it was imperative to keep in mind the complexity of this feature and to assess the clinic's response before proceeding with further iterations. Establishing clear boundaries and scope from the outset helped establish expectations for the entirety of the project.
Annotating Wireframes: Annotating every detail of the feature was necessary for the developers, and aided how we wrote our jira tickets and any questions developers had about the features.
Keyboard Shortcuts: For future state, I would continue to develop the feature by adding keyboard shortcuts.
Auto-populate: For future state, I would conduct more research on how to implement auto-populate for certain text fields. Utilizing a period to initiate predefined phrases was a positive step for this iteration; however, I believe there were situations where field auto-population could be beneficial.
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