The Problem
The problem is real when it comes to medication administration. There are over 1.3 million injuries each year. Most of these errors are due to wrong drug, dose, timing, or route of administration. Healthcare providers today, are trained in all of these issues. In fact, many healthcare providers keep in mind the “five rights” when they administer drugs: the right patient, the right drug, the right time, the right dose, the right route.
The Approach
Reaching out to the source of the problem is the primary task to arrive at a solution. After a couple of interviews with the stake holders, observation and careful deliberation, It came to light that the medication administration in most of the hospitals is done based on the paper records. Even though there were processes in place to understand how and in whose presence the drugs are to be administered, the possibility for human error is still very high.
The Solution
Most of the times the nurse has to go to a patient’s bed and see the task she needs to perform and this needs to be repeated for every patient at different times in a day. The idea is as simple as the solution. What if the nurse gets an alert on her device about what she needs to do next; which patient, what drug, at what time, how much to administer and how to administer? After all, medication error by definition is a preventable adverse effect of care.
Design Samples
Skills Needed
Knowledge of Enterprise UX is the fundamental requirement to address this project. It is imperative to understand the relationships between physician drug ordering, placing drug requests to a pharmacy, update the stocks at nursing stations, administer them keeping the “five rights” in mind and handover the patient record to another nurse after her shift is complete.
I didn’t find the right words till I came across this UX podcast with Melissa Perri. There is a concept of Macro UX and Micro UX which divides how a project of this nature should be looked.
Initial Concept Planning
Mental models, behavior models are formulated based on both primary and secondary research data. First level ideation of the service is made to receive the feedback from functional consultants and opinion leaders.
Drafts & Revisions
Hypotheses and wireframes are prepared considering the feedback. Several iterations are made to get the information architecture right. The idea is not only to ensure that the key information is not missed but the design should emphasize it.
Final Delivery
Well, the goal is to eliminate the human errors not humans. In the final stage, interactive prototypes were made considering all the possible scenarios around drug administration. The results from the usability testing are taken into consideration to make the design more human centric.
The Result
Now nurses can sort things, get timely notifications and be informed of meaningful alerts for error free administration and efficient task management. Intelligent worklist helps the nurse to simplify the workflows while verifying the patients and validating the drugs.
Last words
Most of the times a provision to ask the physician if there are any side effects to watch at the time of drug administration makes the real difference. For projects like this design is a responsibility. It invariably touches thousands of lives every day.
