DIH: Designing the Onboarding Experience for Electronic Health Records
UX Research — Mobile & Tablet
01 Background
The DIH, or Design Institute for Health is a collaboration between the Dell Medical School and the UT College of Fine Arts. For our Interaction Design II class, our team designed a patient’s first experience when accessing their Electronic Health Record (EHR).
Team & Roles
I worked on this project with Sylvia and Philip for our design class, and we conducted user interviews and wireframing together. While our roles overlapped, my main role was product & user research, and Philip and Sylvia worked on the InVision prototype & final UI.
02 User Research
Our goal was to consider the entire experience leading up to a patient accessing their EHR, starting from when they make a doctor’s appointment. Below is a summary of my research of currently existing EHR systems:
Most of all EHRs are available through desktop, few are accessible via mobile & tablet
EHRs are outdated in usability and efficiency (Source)
EHRs give patients full access to their medical records (Source)
User Interviews
Who? We thought about who would best know EHRs and the needs of EHR users. Through this, we chose to interview UX designers in the healthcare field, healthcare professionals and patients.
What? In addition, we thought about questions we could ask our interviewers, which could help us understand the types of emotions that patients have before accessing/opening up their EHRs.
Think about your most recent doctor’s visit — how was your experience?
What sort of registration experiences have stood out to you?
What are some features of EHRs that you would value?
Where? For those who were available to meet in-person, we interviewed users at their workplaces. For those shorter on time or located far away, we conducted a phone interview.
Interview Results
From our interviews, we found out the main pain points and motivations behind the EHR registration process. Through this, we came up with a problem statement that would drive our design:
“EHR registration and login should be secure and sympathetic, but the current process is time consuming and repetitive.”
In addition, we also got to understand the biggest motivators for patients using EHRs, and came up with three user personas.
Interesting design possibilities
Kiosks for patients to interact with
Education in the waiting room (about EHRs)
Top 3 reasons why people want to use EHRs
Directly message doctor
See lab results
Schedule appointments
03 Planning
Based on our problems statement, we began to think about design solutions that would address the needs and pain points of our users. We needed a design that was secure, sympathetic and less time-consuming.
(1) Secure
For security, we looked beyond the standard username and password process and tried to find alternative authentication methods such as 2-factor verification, biometrics (fingerprint or retina scanning), or DL scanning.
(2) Sympathetic
To make our design more humanistic, we decided to use chatbots and conversational language to lead users through registration.
(3) Less time consuming
Finally, to make the process more efficient, we reimagined the physical process and context, starting from when the user schedules an appointment, to the point when they access their EHR at home.
For our final design, we also thought about how to make our solution easy to implement, without the need for special devices.
Thinking about objects that most people have and carry around with them daily, we integrated a driver’s license scan that would (1) authenticate and (2) collect basic information about the patient. The driver’s license scan would be also be used for future check-ins.
Mobile Accessibility
Finally, as a majority of our interviewees said they would like to access their EHRs via mobile phone, we created mobile version of the app. To create additional security, we implemented two-factor fingerprint authentication.
