Plant Chicago

*Most of this work is covered under an NDA. I am happy to discuss this more in depth - please email me and reach out!

The Challenge

Our overall project was to design an internal pharmacy system for technicians and pharmacists to manage and dispense medications. My team was tasked with building the portion of the program that allowed new patients to be registered into the pharmacy system. Overall, users did not currently feel that patient registration was difficult, and it was difficult for both users and the business and product teams to pinpoint exactly what needed to be changed to improve the process.

The Process

When I joined the team, the design team had started conceptualizing what the new registration screens would look like. However, despite looking more modern, there was no way to tell if the designs were an improvement because neither the product team nor the business team knew if there was anything “wrong”. Users had been asked in the past what they disliked about registration, and a majority of them had said it was “just fine”.

I scheduled two rounds of remote interviews with pharmacists and pharmacy technicians employed with my company to probe into the things that could make a patient registration complicated. Each round consisted of eight people - four pharmacists and four technicians. The first round was pure discovery interviews, and the second consisted of follow-up questions and wireframes that were shown to the participants. To develop my moderation guide, I sat down with my team of designers to discuss anything they wanted to know about registration beyond asking simply about pain points - I want to ensure my team did not end up with any unanswered questions.

It was important to not simply ask “What can we improve?” as we knew

Outcomes

Despite almost all participants informing me that registration was easy, I discovered multiple pain points that were consistently brought up by almost all participants.

Recommendations

  1. Current state was that registration was tabbed - Each section on it’s own tab. This forced the user to click around to guess where information should be entered. To streamline the process, all patient sections should be on one, scrollable screen.

  2. Because all the information was separated by tabs, patient attributes that were not used very often would get missed (designating a patient as a pet/animal). This would cause clinical rejections due to the system thinking the patient was a human. Moving this attribute towards the top of the page helps users remember to select this attribute.

  3. Adding and billing insurance plans caused users to guess a lot. Insurance cards are stored in the system with arbitrary plan codes. The current system allows the user to add a note, but the user needs to go out of the way to do so (up to three mouse clicks). It is so busy in the pharmacy that this seldom gets used. It is important to not only allow notes, but to be able to add notes at the time the insurance is entered.