How might we help hospital admins quickly take corrective action?

Research Findings

• Hospitals are required to track environmental measurements for assets such as fridges for blood samples and operating rooms. When a measurement goes out of scope, a nurse or admin must assess the severity of the infraction, take corrective action as necessary, and log the issue for auditing purposes.

• Hospital also need to generate environmental monitoring reports and asset reports for audits. Asset and inventory-type work tend to fall on nurses, not doctors.

• Many healthcare facilities document environmental measurements on paper ledgers.

• When preparing for an audit, clinics often have a week to scramble to provide the documentation needed. 

vs.

MeshCandy's mental model of their value is that they:

1. Install tags/sensors on customer's equipment

2. Provide real-time, aggregated, or filtered data about the equipment

Hospitals' mental model of MeshCandy's value is:

1. Providing alerts about environmental monitoring issues 

2. Logging corrective action taken in response to issues

3. Generating environmental monitoring reports

This was an initial version of the dashboard. The key goals of this dashboard were to:

1. Give her a quick overview of her equipment

2. Highlight currently unresolved issues

3. Show trends to help her notice recurring issues so she can take preventative measures 

We conducted usability testing with 3 users and learned that all of the data we were displaying was a bit overwhelming, and that the dashboard didn't feel actionable.

In the second iteration, we drilled down on the key task of the hospital admin: to quickly take corrective action and log issues. We decided to display issues in a card form so that users can:

1. Take each issue seriously and individually, as it is easy to gloss over issues when they are sitting in a database

2. Give users a way to track progress, as users have to leave their desk to resolve an issue, and not all issues can be immediately resolved

We also decided to display some analytics in a location-oriented tree map so that users can:

1. See which areas have a high density of problems and resolve multiple issues in one trip

2. Prevent future issues from occurring by identifying locations that tend to cause trouble

We brainstormed two layouts for filtering search results and wanted to identify the better-performing one, so we conducted guerrilla A/B tests with 5 users. We asked each user to filter for "temperature", "rooms", and "4th floor" and timed the users on how long it took to complete the task.

Filter Option 1

Filter Option 2

Users vocalized a preference for option 1 because they enjoyed the icons. However, their average task completion time was 19 seconds.

Users found option 2 to be straightforward. It took less time to parse, required less mouse movement and users took 8 seconds.

Dashboard Home Page

Not all issues can be immediately resolved, so we have the "Open Issue", "In Progress" and "Resolved" columns to track progress.

An interviewee said "nobody loves databases", so we gamified the issue resolution experience by presenting issues in cards instead of a database.

To isolate important issues, we color-coded the cards by priority.

We visualized issues by location so the user can resolve multiple issues on one trip.

To incentivize the user to resolve issues, we display performance metrics.

For a complete view of both resolved and unresolved issues, users can refer to the issues log.

Unresolved issues are highlighted and have a bright "Resolve Now" call to action.

Resolved issues are grayed out, but users can still see what corrective action was taken through "View Log."

To find a specific issue, users have multiple filtering and search options.