Client
Clinical Safety Officer
Nurse Specialist Consultant
Product Management
Product Owner
Development
Product Design
Objective
The UK government committed £450 million available over the next two years with an ambition to have 40-50 virtual beds per 100,000 population by December 2023. Visionable wanted to explore creating a virtual ward solution using existing technology. This greenfield platform was a proof on concept and exercise to capture core requirements and user needs.
Role
As Lead UX Designer, I conducted four sessions with a Nurse Specialist in a cycle of capturing requirements, reviewing designs, iterating, and presenting until we felt we had a robust and extensive design that was ready to be validated by real users.
Outcome
A full Discovery to support the case for creating a virtual ward solution in Visionable. At the end of this project we had co-designed a virtual ward UI with specialists, outlined risks and requirements, and validated initial designs.
What is a Virtual Ward?
A safe and efficient alternative to NHS bedded care that is enabled by technology.
Virtual wards support patients who would otherwise be in hospital to receive the acute care, monitoring, and treatment they need in their own homes. This includes either preventing avoidable admissions to the hospital or supporting early discharge from the hospital.
It was essential to involve our clinical specialists from the get-go
After creating initial designs, we wanted to test with real life users
Understanding the problem space
The Nurse Specialist highlighted a clinical requirement regarding the ‘reviewing’ of alerts that are received from the devices worn by patients.
We decided to mimic the review process in Clinicians' current processes to reduce the learning curve and ensure clinical safety. We included check boxes to guide clinicians in their 'sign off', including; 'reviewed data', 'call taken place', 'call made but not completed', and 'clinical notes updated'.
Whilst creating requirements we realised it would be common for one Ward Manager to oversee multiple wards at once.
Therefore we needed to create a dynamic view that would facilitate multiple ward overviews for Managers, and single ward overviews for nurses.
3
Due to time and resource constraints, we were unable to support automatic data entry from the wearable devices.
This meant that we needed an interface for the patient to manually enter their device results at a given period specified by the nurse.
We decided to focus on three key use cases to personalise the data entry, then outlined the medical devices needed to measure relevant vital signs.
Iterate
I created a user testing brief and collaborated with a Product Owner and Clinical Safety Officer to host user testing sessions with three nurses who had 3+ years of experience in the hospital or community setting.
The user testing brief included hypotheses, pre-task questions, post-task questions, testing scripts, and a clickable prototype.
"As a Ward Clerk, I don't need to see patient vitals"
The Nurse Specialist highlighted a clinical requirement regarding the ‘reviewing’ of alerts that are received from the devices worn by patients.
We decided to mimic the review process in Clinicians' current processes to reduce the learning curve and ensure clinical safety. We included check boxes to guide clinicians in their 'sign off', including; 'reviewed data', 'call taken place', 'call made but not completed', and 'clinical notes updated'.
Whilst creating requirements we realised it would be common for one Ward Manager to oversee multiple wards at once.
Therefore we needed to create a dynamic view that would facilitate multiple ward overviews for Managers, and single ward overviews for nurses.
3
Due to time and resource constraints, we were unable to support automatic data entry from the wearable devices.
This meant that we needed an interface for the patient to manually enter their device results at a given period specified by the nurse.
We decided to focus on three key use cases to personalise the data entry, then outlined the medical devices needed to measure relevant vital signs.
Tool tips
To avoid cluttering the dashboard, we wanted to develop a visual language using symbols to represent the vital signs. Due to the clinical nature of the product, it was important to still be able to exclaim the meaning of the icon if the user was unsure.
Tooltips are commonly used as an accessibility tool across many platforms, and therefore by adding the tooltips for the vital signs we were able to enhance product accessibility for everyone.