Patient Insight Dashboard
Empower efficient clinical decision-making from patient data
Project Type
Internship project
collaborated with
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Team
Nuoran Chen (Design)
Anyi Li (PM)
Bing Liu (Design)
Mengzhe Ye (Design)
Jiayuan Wang (Design)
My Role
User Research
UX Design
Contribution
Primary user research
Prototyper
Visual design
Tools
Figma
Figjam
Adobe Illutrator
Overview
Context
The preparation of the radiotherapy (RT) treatment heavily relies on the patient's digital profile.
Half of the cancer patients will go through radiotherapy (RT), which uses sophisticated algorithms and machines to deliver highly accurate radiation into the patient's target area. Doctors need to go through patients' profile to make customized treatment plan.
Three stakeholders get involved in the RT treatment process
There are three different stakeholders in the RT treatment: oncologists, physicists, and therapists, who look at different patients' information.
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Challenge
30 min spent on collecting and reading one patient's info
Currently, the usual time they spend on collecting patient data and reading the reports that are stored in the different systems will be around 30 min or more for each patient.
Solution
30 min !!!
An integrated patient insight dashboard
Our client, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center(MSK), one of the top two cancer care hospitals in the U.S., is developing its internal information system, WARP.
As a part of it, the patient insight dashboard systematically integrates patients’ different digital profiles and longitudinal patient records, helping doctors find and read patients' documents with efficiency.
Impact
From 30 min to 3 min 🚀
The final user test with our three primary users showed that the time to collect information and read the reports of one single patient dropped from 30 min to 3 min. It dramatically reduced the care team's data collection and summary burden, empowering the clinical decision-making from patient data. It helps our radiation specialists diagnose and identify risky patients speed by 300%.
Research
Interview
What do we want to investigate through expert interviews:
GOAL 01
Understand the RT treatment process
GOAL 02
Understand users' info prioritization
GOAL 03
Identify the reason of inefficiency
60min Expert Interview
• Oncologist x 2
• Medical Physicist
• Radiation Therapist
3 X
RT treatment process is like a "relay race"
Three stakeholders look at patients' different documents and make the decision. After that, they will pass it on to the next specialist.
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Users look at patients' info that comes from different stages
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Three users care about patients' information in different periods of patients' longitudinal records, which help them make clinical decision
PAIN POINTS
Three main reasons explain current time-consuming process
01
Can’t quickly find and read needed patients’ info
02
Historical documents are disorganized and unintuitive to read
03
Hard to switch between patients' profiles
How might we create a patient insight dashboard for the RT treatment team to more efficiently find and read different patients’ past and current data?
Ideate
Organize
Input Data
Creating information structure and evaluating the importance of inputted patients' data
We turned the raw data to information structure and scored every section to figure out what information is more valued for all three users so that we can make that information more dominant in the dashboard.
Layout Exploration
Exploring the dashboard layout based on information structure
A. Patient list for the convenience of switching between patient profiles.
B. Historical documents and current records go hand-in-hand.
C. Tool bar to help organize and navigate among different documents.
The winner!
Design & Iteration
We ensure the dashboard design is based on solid foundations through much testing with current and prospective users. Supported by MSK experts with experience with different tools, we conducted usability tests with more than 10+ users during the process.
Usability Test
Iteration A: drop-down patient list to shift among patients portfiles
Before
"I only look at the patient list when I need to switch to the following profile. It takes up too much space on this dashboard."
After
"I love how convenient it is to fold & unfold the patient list and quickly find the patient's profile I want."
Expand sidebar to patient list
• Not intuitive to use
• Search bar disconnects with the
patient list
Narrower patient list
• Distract the user's attention from
the center content
• Can't show more patients'
information except for initials
Drop-down patient list
• More flexible to adapt the space
• Intuitive to use
Iteration B: time tab with check box to trace and compare current and historic documents
Before
"The current way to look at the historical documents is distracting and visually hard to navigate."
"It's hard to compare current and historical documents horizontally."
After
"The time tab on the top offer a much easier and intuitive navigation, I love it."
"Place files side-by-side is a good idea to look at and compare two documents at the same time"
Flipping time page
• Technically challenging to achieve
• Not intuitive to use
• Can't compare current and historical
documents
Time tab without check box
• Easy to navigate but can't compare
current and historical documents
Time tab with check box
• Easy to navigate and compare
documents at different times
Iteration C - Toolbar on the top with clearer information hierarchy
Before
"The position of this side menu is weird and takes too much space."
After
"It's much clearer and intuitive to use. I love how I can see the documents that I want with only one click."
Toolbar on the left
• Conform to the user's reading habits
• Unclear information hierarchy with
the time tab
Toolbar on the right
• Conflict with the user's reading habits
• Unclear information hierarchy with
the time tab
Toolbar on the top
• Conform to the user's reading habits
• Clearer information hierarchy
Final Design
PAIN POINT 01
Can’t quickly find and read needed patients’ info
FEATURE 01
Navigation Bar
Access to needed information by only one click
I created three main features and two bonus features
PAIN POINT 02
Historical documents are disorganized and unintuitive to read
FEATURE 02
Longitudinal Time Tab
Quickly navigate between current and historical patients' documents, creating more intuitive info retrieval by placing documents side by side.
PAIN POINT 03
Hard to switch bewteen patients' profiles
FEATURE 03
Drop-down
Patient List
Easily shift between different patients' profiles and manage daily tasks
BONUS FEATURE 01
Report Full View
Improve doctors' immersive reading experience on small monitors
BONUS FEATURE 02
Make the dashboard more using friendly in the dark environment
Dark Mode
REFLECTION
& NEXT STEPS
Reflection
There were many moments I felt lost about whether the information hierarchy was clear, but actively meeting with clinical users helped me understand their real needs and make the design right for them.
Always turn to users to thrive in ambiguity
01 Design with clinical users
03 Incremental milestone
The clinical users are heavily involved in the design decision-making with the design team
Adopt the clinical feedback from the small incremental test delivery
02 Iteration with users
Weekly user meetings and daily sync up
Each week, my co-workers and I always produced several different solutions and tested them with users to make a reasonable design decision. I iterated on this dashboard every week under users' feedback, and whenever I couldn't make a decision, the clinical users were always here to help. This wasn't a linear but a back-and-forth process, but all the tries were incremental tests that eventually contributed to a precise and easy-to-use dashboard.
Next Steps
More customized front page.
Ranking and overweighting different users' information prioritization clarifies what information is more important to show. Customization would be a better exploration solution for the next step since users' information prioritization isn't stationary but changes accordingly at different treatment stages. Offering users more freedom to manage the layout and features on the front page could be another direct way to offer a clear dashboard.
