Human-Centered Design in Real Time
By: Rachel Romano
Tags: Design, User Experience, Microsoft, Apps, Healthcare

In March, COVID-19 reached pandemic status. Hospitals faced a sharp increase in patients and an equally sharp decrease in resources. Supply chains were significantly delayed, and hospitals overrun with COVID patients were creating bed capacity by any means necessary, from repurposing existing units to creating new ones in tents or ships.

Like hospitals around the world, Swedish Health Services — the largest nonprofit provider in Seattle — had a plethora of doctors, nurses, admins, and other hospital decision makers who needed to track and optimize available beds and clinical supplies like masks and ventilators. They also needed to track patient status and staffing needs. This kind of on-hand and in-the-moment information creates situational awareness to help workers make fast, informed decisions.

Working with healthcare experts, a task force of Microsoft designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, and content designers came together. From end to end, this collective discussed user needs and outcomes, data modeled the business workflows, and designed UX mockups, visual assets, and user guides. They held two-hour design sprints on Microsoft Teams, using mockups in PowerPoint to get everyone on the same page. Design and engineering then used those PowerPoints to rapidly prototype a solution and start another iterative cycle.

Members of the Swedish staff provided expertise that the team folded into the designs in nearly real-time. This insight about necessary levels of granularity and timeliness helped create designs to accurately capture staffing needs. For example, there might be Registered Nurses (RNs) without assigned primary care patients who have more availability. Using a solution that marks nurses as Assigned RN or Unassigned RN, a hospital could quickly re-assign work as it received more patients or other needs shifted.

This also gave frontline workers a voice to request additional support from supply managers, respiratory therapists, or any other clinical or non-clinical roles. Tracking these workers’ requests alongside things like burn rates of masks and other resources enhances situational awareness among management decision makers and helps analyze trends so organizations can best care for patients and keep workers safe.

Working together, an emergency response solution for individual hospital systems was ultimately created. While this is very much a first version that the team is continuing to evolve, several major Washington hospitals are already using it. Now that it’s also globally available in 11 languages, hundreds of organizations worldwide are adopting and exploring it, too. You can learn more about it here and it’s available here.

For government: coordinating regional and statewide healthcare

With the first solution, the team aimed to meet the needs of single hospital systems. With the government, however, they had a different design problem — they needed to coordinate multiple hospital systems. State governments must track and plan logistics across all healthcare providers for their region to allocate critical resources where they’re needed most

To help solve this, our task force held another multi-day HCD sprint with government workers at the Washington State Health Department to create a separate solution that focused on the state’s most pressing needs. Forget what the tech should be, forget what the screens should look like — what outcomes does the state ultimately want to achieve? And based on that, what capabilities do they need, and what are the corresponding personas and user journeys?

Starting with an empty mind map, the design team began identifying and internalizing the needs of medical professionals and government workers. They sketched workflows, held design critiques, and created end-to-end user journeys. Then came rapid cycles of user feedback and design iteration, something open-source design processes easily facilitate.