[Editor’s note: this is the first in a series of blog posts about what we’ve learned about working in healthcare. It’s both exceptionally hard and exceptionally important to get right, and we hope that by sharing our experiences we’ll help other health innovators along the way]
In our design studio, we have Indi Young’s mantra on the wall as a reminder to “fall in love with the problem, not the solution”. Nowhere is this more true than in health, where there are so many real problems to address, and where introducing theoretically clever but practically flawed software could easily do more harm than good.
Over the course of hundreds of hours of shadowing, interviews and workshops with nurses, doctors and patients, we’ve been privileged to learn a lot about some of the problems they all face – and we’re still learning a ton every day. We are constantly impressed by the skill and care that clinicians across the NHS deliver every day, and this is the primary motivation for our team to ensure that these people get the tools they need to appropriately support them in their quest to help patients. In the first of a series of posts about what we’ve learned through working in health, we wanted to share some of the design lessons from building Streams, a secure clinical mobile app that gives the right information to the right clinician at the right time.
Start with empathy
Most products begin with an insight into one core problem. In the case of Streams, it was that urgent clinical information gets retrieved by nurses and doctors over a mixture of outdated desktop computers, pager messages and handwritten lists. This contributes towards delays in care and occasionally serious harm if something is missed, and a 2017 study found that nearly half of emergency response time is wasted due to inefficient communication between systems.
Surely a secure mobile app like Streams that immediately pushes urgent clinical information directly to the right nurse or doctor would be a better solution? We think so, yes. But as we learned more about the working lives of clinicians, and the phenomenon of “bleeper fatigue” – with many doctors telling us that they receive over 100 notifications a day already – we started to recognise how a solution might actually become another problem if we ended up contributing to the general bombardment of messages.
It turns out that there’s a very fine line between alerts that clinicians find useful, and alerts that become a nuisance – and much of this seems to come down to the precise way in which data is presented in the app. For example, clinicians told us that when reviewing a patient’s record in the hospital, they need to see a patient’s hospital number, their allergies and details of previous admissions, rather than the traditional format of listing NHS number and GP practice. This was easy to fix with a subtle change in information architecture, which addressed something that many clinicians found to be more irritating than we initially thought!
Source: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/designing-with-clinicians
