BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Nuance Reached out to Universal Mind to help redefine a digital, voice based assistant for medical professionals. Nuance faced the problem of not knowing user research best practices and being overly familiar with the subject matter and development problems to come at the problem with a fresh set of eyes.
Doctor’s time and attention is extremely rare. Everyone knows this — Dragon Medical One, Nuances diction tool has been in place for a few years with the goal of helping medical staff reduce time spent on notes, and reduce the cost of transcription services. DMO (Dragon Medical One) has revolutionized the space and become a staple of doctors offices and note stations.
Dragon Medical Adviser (DMA) is an attempt to do what DMA did for transcription, to the space of note accuracy, billing, and coding.
Our challenge in this application was to build a tool that benefits doctors from the moment they first turn it on, without increasing their alert fatigue and reducing the amount of churn between coding/billing teams and the physicians they support. We offered recommendations for both DMO and DMA.
My specific role on this project was the UX lead.
PROCESS
Universal Mind used their research backgrounds to do workshops and interviews with internal stakeholders, physicians, chief medical informatics officers, and electronic medical record trainers.
The process, designed to be iterative, involved 6 interviews, 5 workshops, and 2 hospital shadows. All with the goal of understanding the problems physicians face and potential solutions.
EXPERIENCE VISION
A major part of Universal Mind’s process is gaining empathy with users of software. This empathy is hard to give away or present in a few sentences, so what we did for this project was create a series of slides and illustrations that allow us to tell the story of what a physician’s life is like, highlighting some of the benefits of our proposed solution.
For this experience vision we followed Dr. Olivia Lawrence a seasoned physician working within a busy, metropolitan-based hospital as she went threw her day to day life with DMA.
HEURISTIC REVIEW
With any new existing project it is important to understand where you are currently before you can set your sights on the future.
A Design Heuristic or Heuristic review is a process that takes an existing experience and puts it through a few lenses and judges that experience objectively and subjectively on those grounds. For Nuance we set our sights on DMO with 6 core principles in mind. Structure, Consistency, Simplicity, Access, Visibility, and context.
Our findings from this exercise were able to be inserted directly into the backlog to be prioritized and added to their existing platform.
PROTOTYPE
A major goal of this engagement was to have something that could be placed in the hands of medical practitioners and purchasers so they could give feedback in a real time. To solve this goal we built a clickable prototype with Invision that could be taken around and tested in real time.
SOLUTION
Our solution to Nuance’s problem was their major and research assets that they can use as tools on their journey to saving doctors time, increasing the quality of medical notes, and reducing the amount of churn around billing and coding. The final deliverables for this three-week engagement were a heuristic review, an interactive prototype, and an experience prototype.
RESULTS
This engagement enabled the Nuance team to gain additional funding, fill their backlog of work, and gain vision of how they will fit into the future of the medical space.