Orion Health

Project: Enterprise – Visit Manager

Orion Health is a global healthcare software company that delivers solutions for: medical records integration, population health management, and precision medicine. Enterprise is one of their most important products, delivering smart hospitals management solutions around the world. I joined the Enterprise team to bring together the UX vision across three teams in Auckland, Christchurch, and Bangkok.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement,
I have omitted confidential information in this case study.

Project Summary

My Position:
Senior Interaction Designer.

My Role in this Project:
Lead Designer.

Rest of the Team:
– Product Manager.
– Product Analyst.
– Two Junior Designers.
– Three Dev Teams.
– Test Engineer.

Methods:
– Quantitative & Qualitative data analysis.
– Contextual Enquiry.
– User Testing.
– Rapid Prototyping.

Tools:
– Sketch.
– Axure RP.
– Invision.
– Google Analytics.
– Hotjar.
– Typeform.

The Goal

When I joined the Enterprise team, they already had a small UX team in Bangkok. My role was to support the product team during the discovery and validation process in New Zealand.
Our goal was to streamline the patient management workflow across different hospitals. Prior to this project, different public hospitals in New Zealand were operating in silos, creating a considerable overhead and double handling for hospital staff members.

My Role

I supported the user research and design of the Visit Manager, one of Enterprise’s most ambitious projects. The main goal of this project was to deploy an interconnected network of medical records between different public hospitals in New Zealand. At the same time, it was a huge improvement in speed to manage high traffic public hospitals in Thailand, Turkey and Malaysia. During this process, I managed and mentor a junior UX designer, and a Front-End developer who built our design system. I reported to the Director of UX and worked really closely with the Head of Product.

Problem Discovery & Ideation
I worked closely with two product managers in Christchurch and two product managers in Bangkok, organising workshops with the Health District Board (HDB) to validate the workflows and main use cases.

Experience Strategy & Vision
I led the documentation of our insights and shaped the UX vision for the Visit Manager, I created a series of design deliverables, such as Customer Journeys, Workflow maps, and personas. This was fundamental to get everyone aligned across different offices and countries, shape ideas and drive decision making.

Validation and User Testing
I led the user testing sessions, creating a fully functional prototype covering most of the main use cases of the functionality. I gather feedback from the sessions and iterated over the designs. I also documented further improvements for future iterations.

Design Oversight & Coordination
I designed most of the NZ specific workflows and collaborated with the team in Bangkok to adapt the designs to the multiple custom configuration for hospitals in Asian markets. I also documented the Style Guide and supported a Front-End engineer to build a design system.

Leadership
I was in charge of presenting the product vision to internal and external stakeholders.

Ideation & User Research

When I joined the team, the requirements were already defined. The problem to solve was clear, to create a consolidated workflow where hospital staff and administrators could administer inpatient visits across different hospitals. I run a series of workshops along with the product managers bringing different key stakeholders from different hospitals around New Zealand, to iterate on top of our assumptions and make sure we were supporting all the use cases.

Every hospital had different systems in place, even though they were running Enterprise already, different policies, different procedures and different configurations of the system were a key challenge when trying to consolidate different work processes into one.

One Solution to support all workflows
Having in mind that the main goal of the District Health Board, we mapped all different workflows from different hospitals and define what were the main areas of jobs to be done. These main groups were:

Managing patient details
Dealing with different types of events
Managing medical records and medical coding
Reconciling patient visits and events with funding source.
Multiple other subsets of activities that we grouped into Related Activities.

**Outpatient journey map** – Referral management workflow

Design

Since we had a fixed release date, we needed to move fast, I led the design with the support of the junior designer and the design team in Bangkok. I got a series of workflow maps and user stories from the product managers and we start working on them. To speed up the process and iterate faster, I started a series of design demos twice a week with the main stakeholders in the room, this helped raise awareness about the problems we were solving, helped engineers to work on the tech design and it helped bring the product vision together.

Appointment availability screen, a visual challenge, due to overbooking requirements

Validation
Once the designs were finalized we did a series of Usability testing sessions in NZ and I helped the team in Bangkok to run usability testing sessions in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. It was a huge effort that was greatly paid off with the amount of trust we gain internally.

Handover to Development

Pushing management to have the engineers involved in the different iterations was the best decision I made. It was initially considered as a waste of time by the management as they could have been doing actual work, like fixing bugs or working on improvements. But the number of lightbulb moments we had in the review sessions was fundamental, and since they had a solid understanding of the goals and the jobs to be done, their tech design was pretty solid, giving the engineering team a head start when they started building the Visit Manager.

The Design System
Since I joined the team I started bringing the conversation of creating a component library so we could all share UI elements through different teams, especially in this case with such a massive team in different countries and time zones. Initially, this was considered a good idea, but something we could do later.
As we started to have more certainty on how the UI looked and having already a Style Guide designed by the Junior designer under my guidance, the Head of Engineering assigned one of the Front -End engineers to build the design system. We also nominated a UX/Front End taskforce in charge of contributing to the design system which helped different members of the team to own the User Experience of the product, this created a feeling of purpose and commitment to the user that made a great impact in the final result.

UI samples for different use cases and workflows.

The Release

Once we had a stable beta-release, I proposed organising an User Acceptance Week, so we could invite users to our offices and test the release in a controlled environment. The results were generally good and I documented the feedback into three main groups:

Urgent issues we had to fix before the release.
Small wins that could improve the overall customer satisfaction.
Improvements or new functionalities for further releases.

Patient Companion App

After releasing the Visit Manager for Hospitals, we quickly embarked on a new project that we knew was a big opportunity, but wasn’t a priority. This was an app for patients intended to enable communication between patients and the hospital.

The main goals for this project were:

Offer real-time visibility about upcoming visits or events to patients.
Allow patients to request changes to their visits.
Provide patients with basic tools to manage their health habits, goals, and medications.

Discovery

We started the process with a series of workshops with our teams and representatives of our customers. Considering how diverse our clients were (public and private hospitals around the APAC area) I joined the Product Managers for each region to run these workshops locally, to make sure we were validating our assumptions using relevant insights per region.

While we were planning the workshops, and considering the amount of effort required (travel and time) we decided to develop a lo-fi prototype to have something tangible to drive the conversation. In my experience, it is always better to have a visual artifact to drive with users and stakeholders.

Some of the user flows created to drive stakeholder interviews

The workshops and the prototypes gave us good insights on what a feasible MVP would be, some of the main learnings were:

Most of the patients in southeast Asia were heavy users and were already using apps to manage health-related tasks.
Giving patients the ability to manipulate events was seen as problematic by representatives in some hospitals, as it could trigger an increase in slot cancellations which is a big operational inconvenience.
After discussing the importance of having the patient’s next of kin information, we co-design the concept of the Circle of Care, which is a contact list with information on the important contacts of the patient.

Back in New Zealand, we defined the first iteration of the product and the vision for the next couple of years.
The first iteration included:

Goals: Track goals created by the doctor. It also offers the ability to create and track custom goals.
Circle of Care: Contact list for patients including:
- Next of kin
- Medical Practitioners
- Social Workers
- Caregivers
- Others
Medications: A medication tracker.
Basic App configuration, user settings configuration.

Unfortunately, I left Orion Health before the app was finished, so I have no information about how it performed or how it was received by the users.

My takeaways from this project

I had two reports during my time in Orion Health, one was the Director of UX for the whole company and also the Product Director for Enterprise in specific. I think that helped me a lot to improve my business communications skills and it also helped me get better at building and selling a UX vision and strategy.
Dealing with two different cultures was a great learning. From customers to developers, both kiwi and thai cultures are radically different, communicating with both was a challenge that I enjoyed facing.

The release was considered a success and became the foundation of a more interconnected workflow between different public hospitals in New Zealand. Press release here.

This is the end of the case study, thanks for reading.