RE-IMAGINING THE EMERGENCY ROOM WAITING EXPERIENCE
UX Case Study
team: Pegah Sargolzaei,Kay Abushara, Twinkle Panchal, Sunidhi Anand
Roles: User Research & User Testing
Wire-framing & Prototyping
Why I started this project?
The emergency department offers an essential service to the patients, providing occasional care and treatment to people who are injured or require emergency care for other illnesses. Each year, there are over 5 million patients visiting Ontario’s emergency departments. ER departments are sometimes used as a substitute to primary care providers. This usually happens when people have no access to a family doctor or nurse practitioner. Largely, about 90% of patients who visit Ontario’s ER departments are discharged after receiving care, with only about 10 % permitted to hospitals. Therefore, ER departments get crowded easily creating long waiting times for patients. Wait time in emergency department is a huge issue, which is inconvenient for both the hospitals and the patients.
Problem statement:
When a patient comes to the emergency room at the hospital,
their care is prioritized based on the severity of the patient’s
condition and the other patients who are already in the waiting
room. As a result, wait times for a given patient are difficult to
predict.
Patients and their families may spend hours waiting to be seen
and treated by a doctor or another health care professional.
Design Process:
INSPIRATION
SYNTHESIS
IDEATION
PROTOTYPE
Primary research
Secondary research
Quotes and insights
Creating personas
Empathy map
Coming up with new ideas,
Prioritizing ideas
Sketches
Lo-fi wireframes
Hi-fi wireframes
Empathy map
User interview:
Goal: we did interview with different types of people, men and women in different range of ages.
The common answer was bringing the sense of convenience and time-management into emergency waiting room experience.
Some of the question we asked:
Have you had the experience of refer to ER during these few months?
How did you go to ER?
How long did it take to be visited by doctor?
How satisfied you are?
...
'Unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time.'
'Unexplained wait times are longer than explained waits.'
'The more valuable the service, the longer the customer will wait.'
Quotes:
'Anxiety makes waits seem longer.'
Summer Walker
Age: 26
Creative director
1
Consistent
Punctual
Smartphone user
About: Summer Walker is a creative director at Pixar where she manages a team of designers. Due to her busy schedule it's been hard for her to get her regular medical checkup. She is planning on starting a family in the near future. She enjoys doing cardio and participating in boxing classes. However; With her busy schedule she finds herself getting stressed and anxious very easily. She wants to avoid adding more stress into her life.
Pain-point: Seeing a doctor is time consuming.
She doesn’t know how much time she will
spend in the hospital. She understands the importance of seeing a doctor on time and
taking medication when needed, however;
she is still waiting to get assigned to a
family doctor.
Russel Pit
Age: 32
Data scientist
Immigrant
2
Professional
Calm
Generous
About: Russel is a data scientist working at amazon. He has immigrated from Russia to Toronto with his family.
Recently he has pain in his right shoulder and he visited his family doctor thrice where his doctor gave him prescription. Now, his shoulder pain has increased and two of his fingers are numb. So, he has been referred to ER.
Pain-point: He has taken off from his work and he
has been waiting for 2 hours.
There is no source of entertainment, no
Wifi and no charging point.
He wished to carry a book.
Empathy map:
Secondary research:
Overview:
Based on some secondary research on existing devices for improving the experience in ER, we recognized few features as a crucial points in these application,
-
Searching for nearest ER
-
Timer, how long should patients wait
-
Determining the type of injury or disease for prioritizing.
Outcome:
we found that these application had a lot of functional clutter, where the users only needed some of those features that were offered.
In addition, since we considered elderly people in our research as patients who might refer to ER in urgent situations, we found it out for them to use application. The reason is that they are not familiar with technology, and they prefer to find someone to accompany them and don't leave them alone in the process of visiting in ER.
Opportunity:
How might we improve the experience for patients and ED providers in ER?
Grouping ideas:
Navigation
waiting time
sharing medical
records
Directing to the doctor room quickly
Finding cafeteria and services
Managing the time to
avoid wasting time
Showing the time left
Having access to previous medical records
Ability to share it with doctor digitally
entertainment
Have fun during waiting time
Equipping the waiting room to entertaining facilities
Prioritization:
The following prioritization grid is how we filtered out the relevant features.
Storyboard:
From our primary research, we formulated what might be certain scenarios where our users could benefit from our solution.
These scenarios are depicted in our storyboards.
We gain a lot of insight and try to put ourselves into their shoes.
1
Russel was working at his office that felt pain on his stomach.
2
He experienced a sense of confusion to decide to call 911 or ask for help from his colleague
3
After a long time he spent on deciding to go to ER with his friend's help or going by himself, he made a decision and took a bus.
4
He was looking for the nearest ER with application.
5
When he arrived ER, at first, he couldn't find his way, there was no specific sign to direct him.
6
He found Robots which are used to direct the patients, accompany them during the process of treatment, and has already all the information of patient to export to doctor.
Sketches:
Most important sketches of the screens which are appeared on the robot for facilitating the process of treatment for patients.
Home page:
Patients and people who accompany them have options in order to facilitate the process of treatment.They can go through each step which is selected, including Registration, Navigation, and WiFi.
Navigation:
Showing the steps which should be taken in the process of treatment in ER experience.
Try to make it more clear for patients and accelerate the process.
Waiting time:
approximate time that patients have to wait to be visited by a doctor in order to estimate how long does it take to wait in ER.
Registration:
Patients have three options to enter, Login, Sign up, MyChart account, to go through the other step.
Appointment:
Access to the availability of doctors in order to make an appointment for a certain time.
History reports:
Doctors and patients will have access to their reports, including previous prescription, tests, so they don't need physical reports, instead they can have access to the digital one.