Ardha: Streamlining Patient Care

Introduction

As other industries receive the attention and productivity tools they need to become more efficient, the healthcare industry has been patiently waiting for some tools of their own — one main area being patient care.

Given that this was my first freelance opportunity as a product designer, I was able to help Andrew Park, MD, ideate and create the first high-fidelity prototype for Ardha, a digital platform that enables health professionals to streamline patient care coordination.

1. What Is the Problem? (Empathize)

While starting his residency, Dr. Park noticed that, in addition to providing direct clinical care, a significant amount of time and energy was devoted to communicating and coordinating tasks among these 6 different types of health professionals:

1. Medical Doctors (MD)
2. Case Managers (CM)
3. Social Workers (SW)
4. Registered Nurses (RN)
5. Research Coordinators (PhD)
6. Discharge Facilitators (DF)

Though Dr. Park and his team members would remind one another to complete or prioritize certain tasks throughout the day, there was little follow-up and accountability for the less urgent tasks, often leading to frustration and tension.

With teams responsible for managing multiple patients, multiple tasks, and constant communication all throughout, we can begin to see how this affects health professionals directly involved in the end-to-end patient care process.

2. How Might We Solve This? (Define)

For his first attempt to tackle this issue, Dr. Park printed this task sheet he created to track all the tasks related to one patient (see Figure 1):

Figure 1: Dr. Park’s task sheet (V.1)

Though this was helpful in attaining a holistic view of the tasks at hand, here were some of the initial learnings:

• It is tedious for one person to track all tasks for all team members, especially given that one sheet is for each patient.
• It is confusing if there are different people in charge of task-tracking for different patients.
• It is overbearing if there is only one person in charge of task-tracking for multiple patients.
• Team members felt as if they were being micromanaged.

Combining Dr. Park’s personal experiences with the feedback he received, we came to define the problem statement as shown below:

“How might we increase visibility, accountability, and communication among health professionals so that they can work more collaboratively and effectively throughout the end-to-end patient care process?”

Given that task management on pen and paper is neither scalable nor visible, Dr. Park and I began thinking about how we might translate this to a digital experience by first laying out the core pieces of information.

First, we identified what our 6 types of health professionals needed to know about their patients:

• What is the patient’s name?
• What is the diagnosis?
• When were they admitted?
• What is their current length of stay?
• How many approved days do they have left?

Then, we identified what these health professionals needed to know about one another:

• Who are the other health professionals involved in treating this patient?
• What type of health professional are they?
• What tasks are they responsible for?
• What are the statuses of these tasks?

3. What Might It Look Like? (Ideate)

As Dr. Park presented me with a revised task sheet displaying additional pieces of information (see Figure 2):

Figure 2: Dr. Park’s revised task sheet (V.2)

I began identifying potential areas of improvement. From here, I designed a new layout to make efficient use of screen space and account for multiple patients (see Figures 3 and 4):

Figure 3: Revised Task Sheet and Optimized Home Page

Figure 4: Low-Fidelity & Hi-Fidelity Wireframes

4. What is the MVP? (Prototype)

Using InVision, I created a high-fidelity prototype that displays information consolidated by user types and how to assign a new task to a user type (see Figure 5):

Figure 5: Ardha Prototype (V.1)

5. What Were the Results? (Test)

Dr. Park was able to present the prototype and receive funding by placing 3rd in AMIA’s National PitchIT! Competition on November 5, 2018 (see Figure 6):

Figure 6: Ardha in AMIA’s National PitchIT! Competition

With this funding, Dr. Park set out to partner with a developer, build out the MVP, and conduct beta-testing with 2 medical institutions in the Greater Los Angeles area. Here are some feedback patterns that emerged (see Figure 7):

Figure 7: Patterns of feedback based on beta-testing

6. Moving Onward (Redesign)

Fast forward one year later — now it’s November 2019.

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With a fresh set of eyes and a refined palette for visual design, I attempted a redesign of Ardha (see Figures 8–10):

Figure 8: My Patients

Figure 9: My Tasks

Figure 10: My Tasks with the task slideout modal

Incorporating the Task Slideout Modal

Regarding team communication, it’s important to note that there can be any unique combination of health professionals assigned to a patient.

For this particular reason, I decided to design a task slideout modal based on each individual task rather than individual/group chats. Centering communications around each task:

• Leverages each task as its own group chat.
• Notifies just the individuals associated with that task.
• Increases accountability and visibility when it comes to task history and progression.

Visualizing different layouts

Before deciding on the layout we see in Figures 8–10, I initially designed two different layouts (see Figures 11–12):

Layout/Flow A: Horizontal tab-based layout

Figure 11: Layout/Flow A

Layout/Flow B: Vertical tab-based layout

Figure 12: Layout/Flow B

I decided to move forward with Layout/Flow B for two main reasons:

• Scalability: More tabs in the vertical tab-based layout will not increase visual clutter, while more tabs in the horizontal tab-based layout is more likely to increase difficulty in regards to readability (imagine 10 tabs from left to right in the tab header).
• Sub-categorization: Along the lines of scalability, the vertical-tab based layout now allows for sub-categories within each of the main categories: My Patients and My Tasks. My Patients can now support two sub-categories (Active Patients and Discharged Patients), while My Tasks can also support two sub-categories (Active Tasks and Completed Tasks).

As part of the re-design, I created a style guide that future designers and engineers would be able to implement/iterate upon moving forward (see Figure 13):

Figure 13: Ardha Style Guide

Takeaways

1. Get directly involved in the user research process.
   Though it was helpful to get an initial understanding of the problem from Dr. Park’s perspective, I believe it would’ve been much more insightful to actually visit the hospital setting and see for myself how health professionals interact on a day-to-day basis.
2. Ideate for quantity in the beginning.
   Though obvious in the design thinking process, I didn’t take this into account at first and can only imagine how much more considerate the MVP would have been. Moving forward, I would spend more time coming up with different layouts and flows, then decide from there.

I hope this article was an insightful read in learning more about the current gaps in patient care coordination, as well as how we might use technology to change that.

Curious to learn more? Check out Ardha for yourself.

Contributors:

Brian Lee (Product Designer)

Andrew Park, MD (Founder/CEO)