The Challenge

In 2020, I worked as a product designer for Infusync healthcare where we designed solutions to healthcare challenges in Nigeria. We had researched to find out that doctors in private and public hospitals had issues meeting the expected productivity level because they spent more time on documentation and record-keeping rather than attending to patients. This feature aims to help doctors to be faster and more productive when seeing patients. I worked on this feature alone using the design thinking agile process below.

The Process

Discover

I started by carrying out user research. I interviewed some doctors to understand their processes while also reading some medical books to understand how clinical notes are written and recorded. I discovered that the Subjective Objective Assessment Plan (SOAP) methodology was used in writing clinical notes. This can be seen in the user map below.

User Persona

My user research findings include the following;

• Doctors start each session by confirming patients’ details already collected by the other health professionals
• They then go on to start diagnosis from signs and symptoms by asking patients about the issues they have
• After culminating the signs and symptoms, there are a number of ailments that are considered the initial diagnosis.
• This can be confirmed or eliminated through the use of prescribed clinical tests.
• After the results of the test are back, the patient is completely diagnosed and treatments begin Treatments can include drugs, injections, etc.
• A later appointment may be scheduled to monitor the progress of the patient

Pain-points

<aside> 💡 There are a lot of patients to see in a very short time

</aside>

<aside> 💡

Long waiting time for lab reports slows down turnover time.

</aside>

<aside> 💡 Some patients especially the elderly are not educated enough to understand and answer specific questions being asked.

</aside>

<aside> 💡 Many applications are based on the desktop in the doctors’ office, this requires them to take notes on paper while on ward rounds and then transfer to the apps when they are back in the office

</aside>

<aside> 💡 There are a lot of disjointed records and this makes it hard to trace patient medical history.

</aside>

<aside> 💡 Much information is repetitive on clinical notes because of a lack of information integration

</aside>

<aside> 💡 Patient progress is hard to monitor especially if the patient doesn’t come back as scheduled.

</aside>

<aside> 💡 Current applications require a lot of typing which makes note-taking a lot more tasking

</aside>