The Screening Tool and CHARMcare Resource Directory are live!
🙋🏼♀️ My Role
Product designer and product manager hybrid, responsible for all design and product activities on the team. Team included 2 software engineers, scrum/program manger, and business analyst.
🌟 Goal
Help patients and community members get access to community resources to resolve their social determinants of health with an integrated social needs screening tool and public resource directory.
👨👩👧👦 Who
Caseworkers: Social worker or nurse helping patients navigate their care
Patients: People visiting the ER, possibly needing community resources (i.e. housing, employment, food)
🤨 Why
The Baltimore City Health Department (BCHD) received a grant from the Accountable Health Communities program to implement a social needs survey for patients in emergency rooms. BCHD wanted to expand on this program to include a software to track the data and provide public access to the resource directory.
Discovery - Kickoff with a Design Sprint
We kicked off the project with a 1 week design sprint to scope and prototype a quick MVP.
Current Workflow: Patient fills out paper questionnaire and then caseworkers manually data into a temporary system.
We created a system journey, and focused on the Screening aspect and make the assumption to test: can we put the screener on an iPad for patients to fill out (reducing manual data entry)?
💡 Ideation
I facilitated brainstorming sessions, like HMW? and Crazy8s activities, to help us focus on a concept for the prototype.
💡 Prototype
We figured out the main steps and screens that would be required to allow the Caseworker to find the patient's details and help them answer the screening questions.
I created a clickable low-fidelity prototype in Sketch and InVision in order to test with Caseworkers.
🖥 Usability Testing / Sprint Outcome
After interviews with 5 social workers, I determined:
Low confidence that patients could not do this own their own with iPad (language & tech difficulties)
High confidence that we should move forward with building the MVP prototype for caseworkers to screen patients
Continuous Discovery
🛠 Discovery Process
After the design sprint, I continued iterating on the screening tool while deepening our research on the various personas so that we could better understand the needs for the Resource Directory.
By conducting focus groups with patients and contextual inquiry and interviews with Caseworkers, I created detailed personas (examples below) and journey maps.
🗺 Journey Map & Pain Points
By creating the Caseworker journey map, I learned about the major pain points and opportunities to improve their experience:
⚡️ Their major pain point was that there were too many tools they used in their current workflow and it was difficult to keep track of all of the patient details.
⚡️ Each hospital had a slightly different way of tracking patient information and social needs.
Caseworker Journey Map (Current)
Ideation
💡 Solution Space
I facilitated a variety of workshops with our stakeholders to make sure that we created a workflow that was general enough to apply across 11 hospitals, but still detailed enough that Caseworkers could maintain all the necessary details about patients.
The example journey below shows that the number of tools would be reduced to one central place for tracking and finding resources. We made the number of steps as few as possible, while including features likes notes that allowed Caseworkers flexibility in the data and content. The resource directory was integrating with the navigation tool to streamline their work.
Caseworker Journey Map (Future)
🌀 Iteration
I employed low-fidelity tools to create alignment with stakeholders and the engineering team prior to high-fidelity mockups, like a tech diagram to show the database models and a wireframe flow to clarify the content model.
I also had a few iterations of the mockups to get feedback from stakeholders and Caseworkers on the visual design and interactions of the patient dashboard.
Tech Diagram for Data Details
Wireframe Flow for Content Model
Iteration of the Patient Dashboard
Prototype & Test
🖥 User Flows & Usability Testing
We had weekly rounds of iterative feedback of the high-fidelity prototype through interviews with Caseworkers, Patients, and project stakeholders during development.
I worked closely with the engineers to create a design system and visual style guide.
Overall Flow for Caseworkers
Resource Directory Flow for Patients / Public Users
Example of Design System and Style Guide Details
Implement & Launch
🌟 Successful Launch!
AHC Screening Tool launched across Baltimore City Hospital ERs! Reduced data processing time by over half, resulting in efficient screening and quicker data delivery.
CHARMcare launched Spring 2019 & is still used today! It was essential during COVID-19 response!
Mockup of the Patient Dashboard used by Caseworkers
Gif of the CHARMcare.org Resource Directory working live!
Kind Words from My Teammate, Software Engineer, Jenny
