Care at Home iPad App

A case study about providing care in the home with a mobile clinical app.

2019 - 2022

My Role
Sr UX Designer

The Team
UXR, PM, PO, ~4 Engineers, 1-2 QA

Goal
Create a mobile workspace that supports current workflows and helps clinicians focus on their patient’s health.

Problem
Clinicians were struggling with the previous iPad app due to various reasons, particularly:
• Limited access to patient info
• Numerous usability issues
• Care plan challenging to populate
• Appointment driven app
• Could not see vitals history or progression against care plan
• No insights into other services their patient’s were receiving
• Repeatedly driven to website for information

Process
Collaborating with clinical experts, product leaders, and iOS developers, we embarked on a 3-year, multi-phased project for an industry-leading long-term care electronic medical records company.

As part of the kickoff to the project, we conducted a 3-day design sprint where we interviewed clinicians and rapidly prototyped low-fidelity concepts.

Over 10 field studies were conducted as part of our ongoing research with users. This involved following clinicians into the home of patients to view current challenges and discover insights. Visits included a range of activities such as routine visits, wound care and medication setups.

We created “The Golden Thread” during the design sprint that the team used as an over-arching guide to keep the team focused on the story of the user, Jean, the home care RN.

Early Iterations
Throughout all design and development, we started with very low fidelity and whiteboarding to quickly facilitate concepts and ideas.

Examples of low-fi mockups during discovery and design iterations.

Testing Designs
A key, on-going part of our iterative process, we regularly conducted usability sessions by putting prototypes in front of clinicians to test designs and workflows before beginning development. Also, as part of the Apple Enterprise Design program, we were able to have monthly check-ins with an Apple designer and engineer where we shared designs and received design critique and development guidance.

Design examples used in prototypes on an iPad, both medium and high fidelity.

Persona Update
To increase use of our existing personas, we updated the persona cards to be easily understood.

The Solution

Care at Home Clinical iPad app
Home health clinicians were thrilled with the design of the Care at Home Clinical app, which closely followed Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for native app design. This gave the app a very familiar iOS interface similar to many regularly used Apple iOS apps like the Settings app.

Users were able to fully access their patient’s health information, see previous documentation, monitor progress against their care plan and take care of their documentation inside or outside of an appointment.

The main screen of the app upon opening a patients record shows appointment details, any upcoming appointments the patient has, and suggested charting documentation depending upon which appointment service is provided.

Main page of a (fictitious) patient's record in the Care at Home Clinical iPad app. — Appointment screen.

Care Plan Progress
Clinicians can monitor the patient’s progress toward care plan goals and track the interventions that were applied during previous visits.

A Documentation of a patient's progress against their care plan goals in the Care at Home Clinical iPad app. — Main care plan page with goals and intervention progress.

Care Plan History
Clinicians can access the history page of a goal or intervention which provides more detailed information and associated documentation from previous visits.

History page of a patient's progress against their care plan goals in the Care at Home Clinical iPad app. — Care plan history page

Managing Medications
The patient’s full list of active and discontinued medications is available with any drug interactions that exist, and the Drug Regimen Review charting docs that were created from previous visits. Medications can also be added at any time.

A patient's list of active medications with access to details of their med interactions. — Patient medication page with active medications, interactions, and DRR documents.

Medication Details and Setup
Clinicians can see more detailed information about a particular medication, get med information, access interactions and provide medication setup data.

Medication details page including med setup info and access to med interactions content. — Medication detail page.

Tracking Vitals
The Vitals page, which was created before Swift Charts were available. I would love to redo this page with Swift Charts. Vital in red indicate readings that are outside of the patient’s threshold. Medication icons represent when a medication was changed, which may correlate with a change in vitals.

Recordings of vitals over time for a (fictitious) patient in the Care at Home Clinical iPad app.

Clinician Task Page
At any point, a clinician can come back to their task page and see their list of appointments for today, tomorrow, or any that are overdue. Opening an appointment, a To Do, tapping the patient name from the list of patients takes the clinician into the patient record, as shown on the previous screens.

Clinician home page displaying a list of appointments today, tomorrow, and any that are overdue. They can also access a To Do list as well as see their list of patients.

The Results
• Minimal training for new app
• Reduction in documentation time
• Greatly reduced the need to access web on mobile
• Clinicians easily understood and manipulated the UI
• Fully iOS native app which was easily upgraded for iOS updates and therefore future-proofed

The Care at Home Clinical app that is currently available in the App Store.