IRIS for Health
Re-Inventing a 20-Year-Old Healthcare Interoperability Product
InterSystems
This project was big, so I broke it into multiple case studies. This page is an intro to the project. Click here to jump to case studies.
Re-Inventing
My task was to completely revamp this legacy enterprise product. The product has 7 core workflow pages and 50 supporting experiences (settings, edge cases, and system states). To date, I have performed exploratory research on all main workflows and most supporting experiences. I redesigned 4 core workflows: 2 of these workflows have shipped, and I performed usability testing on 6 core workflows.
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My goal was to maintain the complexity required to perform workflows in this product while simplifying how the user approaches these workflows. The redesign needed to be intuitive for both new and current customers, and without requiring extensive retraining for current users.
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What is "Interoperability"?
Interoperability means connecting different systems together so they can exchange information. A physician may request an x-ray on their system, and that request needs to be received by the x-ray department. When the x-ray department performs that x-ray, those images need to be sent back to the physician. There are thousands of messages being sent in a hospital every day–from a nurse requesting a meal service for an inpatient to the billing department processing insurance for patient discharge. This is interoperability: and when it breaks, patient care suffers.
DURATION
June 2023 - Ongoing
ROLE
Lead Researcher
UX/UI Designer
TEAM
1 Designer
2 Product Managers
2 Software Developers
KEY SKILLS
Design Research
UX/UI Design
Digital Product Mockups
Stakeholder Management
How I Contributed
I led the research and interview analysis efforts, conducting over 80 exploratory and usability interviews. I began with an initial exploratory research study to understand the current state of the product.
I produced insights that served as the guiding foundation for the redesign, iterated from wireframe to high fidelity designs in Figma and validated the designs with usability tests.
My Approach
I’m a big fan of showing early stage low-fidelity concepts. Seeing a concept in an early stage helps show users that we’re able to adjust course.
Users have mentioned how much they enjoy being a part of this process when they see unpolished sketches. It encourages them to pick up their pen and add on to what I show them.
There is a developer present at every interview I conduct. I provide product roadmap suggestions based on research evidence to the product managers. The whole team has full visibility into my design decision making process.
Methods
I performed exploratory and usability testing as well as facilitated internal stakeholder feedback sessions.
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Conducted 20 exploratory interviews
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Conducted 60 usability tests
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Conducted 12 internal stakeholder feedback sessions
I use thematic analysis (grounding theory) to group interview notes, summarize them into findings, and turn these findings into insights.
I’ve run card sorting activities with customers at our company’s annual conference and facilitated design brainstorming sessions with our internal teams.
Who is our user?
Integration engineers who typically come from software development or other technical backgrounds.
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Not all hospital systems record and read data in the same way. The integration engineer needs to route data from Point A to Point B and ensure that data is in the right format before it gets to its final destination. For example, some systems may write their date in YYYY-MM-DD format but will need to be read by a system in MM-DD-YY format. Even a small difference like ethos can make data unreadable between systems.
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​The interface needs to display hundreds of endpoints resulting in thousands of connections. That’s a lot to keep track of, and my goal for this product redesign was to maintain the complexity required to manage these systems while simplifying how the user approaches this management.
Image from unsplash
Overall Impact
This first redesign established a new navigation standard across the product. It reduced the amount of tabs that needed to be opened by 85% and reduced the number of clicks by 66%. New changes mitigated risk by increasing clarity of data dependencies and reduced time required to assess downstream integration impact by consolidating information into a single visual workspace
This change improved users’ ability to understand system relationships. A few users commented, “This makes it much easier to visualize where things are going”. Our sales engineers commented, “Thanks for fixing the tabs problem”. Users also responded positively to the new features, with one example being a new search feature: ​"I love the search feature. We've been wanting something like this for a long time."​
Case Studies
This project was big, so I'll break it down. Click on the case studies below for more detail on the work I did.
