Designing a EHR software that helps fertility and counselling providers deliver more empathetic care.
Role
Product Manager
Project
MVP Healthcare Software
Team
Product
Timeline
3 Months
overview
DemeterEHR is an electronic healthcare record (EHR) software that aims to unify independent fertility clinics with independent fertility counsellors. This project is designed to improve the care experience for IVF patients and to help providers deliver better and more relevant care experiences. In partnership with Sunlife, I was able to lead a team of 4 designers to develop a B2B SaaS platform for facilitating communications between fertility care providers.
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Understand the current challenges experienced by women undergoing fertility treatment
Understand the workflow of clinicians and counsellors - how can we implement our solution without creating extra work?
What exists in the current system that prevents care givers from providing the treatment they want to give?
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There is a lack of literature on the doctor/provider experience in IVF treatment - How can we figure out what doctors need?
What are some of the legal and regulatory frameworks that we need to know about in order to have a viable product?
We lack the technical knowledge and experience in navigating the fertility treatment process.
How can we prepare IVF clinics to address their patients’ mental health concerns?
To kickoff our research, we decided to look at patient testimonials and articles on the care experience of former IVF patients to identify common obstacles and sentiments surrounding the treatment process. Overall, we found that patients are not satisfied with the care experience provided by clinicians and uncertain nature of fertility treatments amplifies stressors.
Because clinics only interface with the patient in regards to treatment plans, clinicians can only have so much time with patients to understand their emotional needs. By interviewing 3 IVF clinics and sharing our research findings, we were able to identify key findings that would inform our solution.
To get a better understanding of our users and the systems that they interact with, we created a service blueprint to visualize this journey. EHR systems act as the backbone of clinic processes, so it is important to think about the various types of users that interact with this system, from administrative staff to embryologists that work at the clinic.
One of the key findings that we were interested to learn more about was the collaboration that happens between psychiatrists and clinicians. Some fertility clinics will have partnered counsellors, but most do not, resulting in patients having to go and find fertility counsellors themselves. Fertility counsellors differ from traditional counsellors in that many of them have undergone treatment and have deeper knowledge of the medical terminology.
Currently, communication between counsellors and clinics outside of partnerships seldom happen as there are no formal channels to regularly facilitate this communication. This results in patients having to take on the additional burden of remembering and relaying information between both parties.
Once we had defined the purpose and goals of our MVP, we were able to simplify our user flows into the following. We wanted to close the communication gap between counsellors and clinics to improve patient care and wellness outcomes.
In order to understand the current solutions and best practices, I completed a competitive analysis of alternative project management software on the market such as Monday, Wrike, and Asana. This provided us insight on how we should go about structuring and designing our site.
Through our extensive user research and literature review, we were able to identify 3 key pain points that we wanted our solution to address which we were able to turn into goals.
To better understand where our providers fall short in providing excellent care experiences for patients, we created our persona Ryley to help us better empathize with patients and where gaps exist in her fertility journey.
Because this is a project that will be built from the ground up, it was important for our early features and requirements to reflect the minimum function
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There were 3 key interfaces we had to design for this project: Clinic facing, counsellor facing, and user facing. This was a very ambitious project that could not have been completed without the ongoing support received from our industry partners. We did a lot of exploration on clinic and counsellor requirements as they were the most complex users to solve for.
Early on we were relying on looking at competitor demos and designs to gain an early understanding of EHR software, which presented as a major obstacle for us because we lacked the training and medical background to understand the value of the features.
We engaged with clinicians and counsellors across Canada to get a better understanding of their workflow, understand technical language, and worked closely with them throughout the entire design process. We were able to identify some important features that clinicians and their teams need when processing a patient for treatment.
Because of the highly specialized nature of fertility providers and their tools, we worked closely with our partners every step of the way to ensure that our MVP was hitting the mark for our users. By showing them our sketches and low-fidelity wireframes, we were able to begin discussions on what works and what doesn't. It is through these conversations that we were able to further refine our features and capabilities.
We created 3 main features for our provider side application; the patient pinboard, shared journalling, and provider communications.
One of the first features we defined was the patient pinboard, where providers can pin documents to the first page to reduce the amount of back and forth between tabs to cross-reference relevant information on the patient. For example, one patient's bloodwork document might be important to constantly have open, where another patient it may be more important to be constantly aware of their medications.
By allowing providers to customize a main page for their patients, they can also help their team better understand a patients' main concerns in situations such as being assigned a temporary doctor.
Another feature that we explored was to help counsellors get more touch points with users outside of appointments. Journalling was a feature we explored, as it has been shown to have positive effects on mental wellness but is also an avenue for counsellors to get documentation and prepare for upcoming sessions.
A pain point that we found with patients is that several IVF protocols involve medications where mood swings and brain fog are common side effects. By allowing users to journal and share select entries with counsellors, we can alleviate the burden of preparing for sessions from the patient and provide much clearer insight for the counsellor to create more effective counselling experiences.
Lastly, we needed to figure out how provider feedback would be facilitated and surfaced to partner providers. We decided that having it as a optional document that can be pinned would be the most effective, as some patients opt to never use a counsellor or would prefer if counsellors and clinicians did not communicate.
In order to collect patient feedback and collect consent, we also designed a mobile application to help patients manage and track their fertility journey through actions such as swapping providers, journalling, and editing consent for health data transmission between their providers.
Through discussions with our providers, we were able to get a better understanding of some of the medical terminology used within EHR software and did our best to provide doctors the information they needed at a glance without compromising on layout and spacing.
Additionally, counsellors get a tab for accessing patient journals where they can quickly browse and identify entries that would be relevant to them. For example, the mood indicators and shared prompts would help counsellors find days that patients may want to discuss ahead of the appointment.
Lastly, admin staff can access provider calendars, patient information, and contact information in order to manage and make bookings.
Completing this capstone project was an opportunity for my team to demonstrate the skills that they have polished up over the years and to build something meaningful together. As the product manager and lead designer, I worked a lot on making sure my team had what they needed to succeed and to challenge my teammates to grow. This experience has taught me a lot about motivating a team, thinking big picture, and building products that excite the user.
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Because of the immense scope and complexity of the project and the very short timeline we were provided to achieve it, there are many things I would update and change if I had more time with it. A major obstacle that we have to fully overcome was our lack of medical background and inability to fully comprehend our competitors' products. I would've loved to spend more time with doctors and register with competitor demos to better understand the ins and outs of the EHR software space. This would help us create a more realistic high-fidelity providers' piece where it would be a much more viable MVP than the version we have now.
Another aspect that we wanted to touch on if we had more time was exploring more workflows for the other roles present in a clinic. These roles include nursing teams, embryologists, admin staff, and substitute doctors and all have specialized functions within a clinic. While we have thought about their touchpoints with the primary doctor, thinking and designing out a more fleshed out work flow would also be an amazing improvement to our current design.
Conclusion
Behind the scenes
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Figma & FigJam
Adobe CC, Google Suite
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My amazing capstone team
Our Sun Life mentor Samanthi
The Sun Life team for supporting us!
