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1. Problem

HCPs managing multiple patients remotely

Without regular in-person appointments, there’s a lack of structure for the teams of healthcare professionals (HCPs) to take care of multiple patients. They will need to manage messages and meetings with patients as well as internal communications.

Current communications are not effective

The current communications are scattered across the platform and important messages get lost. There’s an opportunity to facilitate regular and effective communication between patients and HCPs while calling out of any emergencies to ensure HCP can provide the care the patient needs.

2. Background & Role

Why remote health consulting

Remote health consulting helps both the patient and HCPs to save money and time. Its demand has increased after the pandemic, especially among elderlies and patients in the care home, who have no choice but to avoid all hospital visits.

Role

My role was UX Designer and project manager
I worked with Suburbans health cofounder Naveed, who himself is a GP who saw a huge opportunity to improve remote healthcare, and their development team

3. How I got to the solution

Requirement gathering workshops & Feature matrix to clarify ambiguity

We followed up our initial product discussion with a feature matrix that captures all the features that are in and out of scope. We have also colour-coded the features by priority to form a product road map.

Iterations of design and co-create sessions to define information architecture

Through regular design reviews with our client who is also a GP, we improved the design to best meet the HCP’s need: to get to critical information quickly to take the right actions.

Ideation sessions to eliminate the risk of miscommunication

To steer clear of any danger of sending messages to the wrong chat, which might cause serious and unintended consequences to the patient, we considered ways of separating the HCP-HCP and HCP-patient chat box.

4. How does it work

5. How it solves the problem

Effective and efficient interface

We’ve implemented 2 features to direct the HCP’s attention to what matters:

We prioritised displaying an overview of the patient’s medical readings over their personal details. By adding labels and alerts to highlight any unusual readings, we direct them to areas that need their input.
During emergencies or before surgeries, when the HCPs need to focus the most, admin users can limit the data display on the dashboard to prevent distracting the HCPs.

Error prevention

To ensure important messages are sent to the correct recipient, we kept the 2 chat boxes on different navigation bars. We also added a message above the typing field to differentiate the two and reassured the HCP before they send the message.
The e-ink screen on them provides use and storage guidelines

6. Challenge

Missed opportunity to understand the users

Due to budget and time constraints, we didn’t get to interview multiple HCPs to understand the problem they face during remote consultation. Luckily for us, our client is one of the users himself so we were still able to get some level of insight to inform the design.

Lack of user testing due to time constrains

Again for the same reasons, we didn’t get to conduct any structured usability testing, but our client took the time to share the prototype with his connections and we still got useful insights that way.

7. Impact

Usability

The streamlined design allow HCP to understand patient’s condition effectively

Scannable

The dashboard design allows clinicians to quickly scan the necessary information

Happy clients

The clients delighted by the end result and were able to get more funding with the prototype

Developed & launched

After the UI design and development phase, the product is now in the hands of HCPs

8. Learnings

Compromising on design process

Understood that in the real-world we couldn’t always follow the perfect process, but we can still use the resources available to us to involve the users as much as possible while still advocating the value of following the process.

Initial and regular communications

Some contributing factors to the project running smoothly are the in-depth initial discussions on the project expectation, sufficient communication between iterations, and the requirements being well documented.

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