Design In Health Care Software
Designing with Purpose: Enhancing Usability in Healthcare IT
With over 25 years of experience creating and building IT applications for companies of all sizes, I've found that designing with purpose is more critical in healthcare than in any other industry.
Keriton began as a pair of mobile applications focused on Breast Milk Management, managing inventory and ensuring feeds were validated for safety to catch any "near-misses." We spent considerable time working directly with NICU staff to ensure our product fit seamlessly into their workflows. This relationship evolved from transactional to a partnership, allowing us to expand our offerings. While managing Breast Milk is complex, the technical and design challenges grow significantly with additional substances (e.g., Donor Milk and Formula) and different user personas (Milk Techs, Analysts, Admins, etc.).
Many believe the purpose of design is to create something beautiful, but we see it as enhancing usability. Here's a great definition:
"Design is a craft and a discipline that applies a specific mindset and skillset to a creative problem-solving process. Doing so leads to the development of informed, inclusive, purposeful, compelling, and innovative solutions."
Design for Health, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Following this human-centered approach made Keriton appreciated by our users. We worked hard to design with purpose, not only meeting user requests but turning feedback into features that exceed expectations and fit smoothly into clinical workflows. Sometimes, this requires us to push back on feature requests to understand the underlying reasons. We often ask questions in different ways or build prototypes to demonstrate potential workflows and help users visualize possibilities.
We benefit from in-house subject matter experts: senior nurses with decades of experience in the hospital units we support. While I have technology expertise, I rely on these SMEs to explain what's important in workflows and identify pitfalls. I've learned more about infant nutrition than I ever knew there was to know.
A non-standard example of our design improvement involved solving a supply chain problem with a client. Keriton initially required labeling all manufactured products to track details like lot # and expiration date. While this worked for cans of powder and jugs of donor milk, labeling hundreds of small ready-to-feed formula bottles was an issue for a children's hospital. We realized the required information was already on the bottle as part of the GS1 GTIN. We updated our applications to scan and use this information, saving hundreds of hours in the warehouse and improving Kare Nurse's usability in clinical settings.
Our current focus is reinventing our discharge process to account for all inventory handling permutations.
New features create new demands. As Steve Jobs said, "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." It's exciting to demonstrate a prototype to someone who suddenly needs a particular feature.
Hospital IT systems aren't typically known for flexibility, but as our products are SaaS (Software as a Service), we are more agile than legacy systems and deliver needed features quickly.
Our users eagerly anticipate new features, but feeding premature infants isn't the place for a throw-it-against-the-wall ethos. We conduct software testing in our development environment before engaging customers to test in their per-hospital staging environments. Only after rigorous testing, including all the weird corner-cases we've found, do we deploy to each hospital's staging environment. It's all about "feeding the babies" for us, so we choose deployment times between scheduled feeds for the hospital's smallest patients.
About the Author
Dan Kelley is Chief Technical Officer for Keriton.