In my final year of college, I was assigned to collaborate with Red Thread Innovations, an outside company, to develop an application that would improve or enhance the experience of using specific healthcare solutions. Although we were constrained and had to concentrate on a particular region, the project offered a very good experience in conducting in-depth research and obtaining data in order to create a coherent and useful final product. This project's primary objective was to establish comfort and demonstrate the proper way to do research for a product.

Our team was responsible for researching access for people through Telehealth and Virtual Healthcare solutions. Our team delved into discovering ways to intergrade wearable tech into the healthcare system, as well as incorporating a more accessible mean of connecting and communicating with health care professionals. We ended up creating a phone application that allows users to store and passively obtain their own medical data and be able to use that information to reduce the wait time and enhance their experiences with health experts.

According to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a doctor visited a patient for 16 minutes on average, during which time they used the electronic health record, or EHR. When you take into account the new procedures brought about by COVID, this statistic can easily rise over time. In addition to creating stress and lengthening patient wait times, this would also put pressure on the administration and nurses, who would need more time to locate the necessary paperwork. They might not be able to verify the accuracy of information collected through patients, or they might have challenges in obtaining patient responses. Additionally, the EHR does not provide enough context on a patient's medical history, which leads to questions from physicians and nurses that would have been answered at a prior visit.

This chart shows the current state on how patients usually go about seeing the doctor. We listed these steps from feeling unwell, to seeing the doctor and recorded the positives, negatives and importance of each area. From our research, we determined that the Intake Forms and Waiting Steps seemed to have the most issues that needed to be resolved.

Create an accessible workflow that enables patients to transfer passive and active medical data to medical professionals in a constructive and convenient way?

During the pre sprint, the team decided to create a team canvas that would help delegate what we want to accomplish, as well as the rules and restrictions in order to keep everyone accountable for their work. Afterwards, we conducted a 14 week project plan in order to keep on schedule.

As a team, we wanted to try and put ourselves in the user's shoes and understand the pain points of the current process to find a potential solution. We created affinity maps, user journey charts and empathy maps to help guide us in our decision-making, as well as conducting interviews with patients, doctors, and Nurses to better understand EHR and current process.

Once the research was completed, the team got together to have a discussion on what patients do and how they would act or feel in the situation that they’re in. From there, we went into creating a User flow for our potential solution.

After conducting all of our research, we developed a logging application that would allow both doctors and patients to enter and retrieve medical records before visiting the physician or hospital. This would cut down on the quantity of paperwork and perhaps inaccurate information that is distributed, as well as shorten everyone's wait time. We discovered some elements that functioned well and came up with fresh concepts for a potential revision of this project during our final cognitive walkthrough, but there were still some outstanding questions.