Hospital performance improvement tools
Role: design researcher; Consultant
Design challenge
To help hospital executives, directors, managers, and physicians more easily understand current performance and achieve goals through real-time, customizable tracking
overview
As part of my position as a Consultant for The Healthcare Management Council, Inc. (now iVantage Health Analytics), I collaborated with software developers to design, develop, and implement a dashboard product for hospital staff to track performance, with a focus on quality, cost, clinical performance, productivity, resource utilization, patient satisfaction, and reimbursement issues. Through an iterative process involving unstructured interviews with end users and usability testing of different versions of the online interface, I was able to help our software developers understand how and why the product needed to integrate with users’ other daily tasks, and accommodate a range of use levels/profiles.
process
My team noticed that our standard web-based hospital performance improvement product was often unwieldy for end users’ daily needs, and realized we needed to produce an online interface that would allow each individual user at our client hospitals – from department managers, to physicians, to CEOs – to view a customized display that would enable them to better accomplish and track their progress on action areas we had identified in our consulting services. Working closely with software developers, I identified users from our client hospitals representing a range of positions and data needs, from digging into the details of an individual patient’s case, to looking at the daily or monthly fiscal health of the entire institution. I interviewed each of these users to understand how they currently used our online product, where it met their needs, where it presented pain points, and what additional tools they desired. After relating key insights from these conversations to the programming team, we also looked at mouse click-based heat maps and page view logs to see how clients were using our site and which types of clients were the most active users. We sketched what such a product might look like and developed a starting point from which the programmers could create a prototype. I tested this web-based prototype with users, remotely sharing my computer desktop and observing how they navigated through the product, what problems they encountered (voiced or unarticulated), and what features they found useful or unnecessary. I also observed meetings held by other colleagues in which the prototype was shared, taking careful notes on how my colleagues and their clients utilized it. Throughout the process, I probed for ways to alter and refine the product.
outcomes
After multiple iterations, we devised a dashboard product that was integrated into our standard product, and that could be used intuitively by a wide range of users. This product implemented many of the key insights that I had gained from my research process. I had found that there were both casual users (e.g. department managers who would only use the product during their annual reviews to track how they measured against their goals) and intensive users (e.g. finance directors who would use the product daily to track a wide range of indicators) with very different needs to accommodate. By listening to the intensive users – those most likely to use the product most often – talk about their other daily tasks, I was able to see that this product should not only be for HMC-related activities, but instead provide a tool to make all of their work tasks easier and more integrated. We were thus able to make a dashboard that not only tracked the indicators that our company included in our standard offerings, but could also track customized data and indicators provided by each individual user. In this manner, these users could incorporate the product into their daily tasks and use it not only to focus on the action items provided by HMC, but also to streamline their everyday operations.