AURA

by

A framework connecting health organizations with specialty labs to send and receive orders and results entirely within the Electronic Health Record.

CHALLENGE

The Electronic Health Record (EHR) today is capable of linking health organizations with specialty diagnostic groups to provide their services to a wider patient population. However, a large amount of time and effort is spent setting up these point-to-point connections. For each individual connection, the planning & implementation process needs to be repeated on both sides to offer the specialty tests to patients.

SOLUTION

Create a toolset that enables these connections within the EHR to standardize the process, drastically streamline implementation, and simplify the downstream workflow for providers placing these orders.

TIMELINE

Initial Release: Mar 2022 - Apr 2023

Ongoing Support: Apr 2023 - current

MY ROLE

  • Problem Definition

  • Design Sprint Organization & Facilitation

  • Workflow Mapping & Information Hierarchy

  • Wireframes, Mockups, and Prototyping

  • Usability Research

  • Communication & Marketing Materials

  • Collaboration with Designers, Developers, Quality Managers, and Stakeholders

DISCLAIMER:

I can’t talk about things in detail due to NDA restrictions (are you shocked?), so I’ll talk generally about the design process and the cool outcomes that are disclosed.

BACKGROUND

Epic Systems is a large healthcare technology company that primarily offers the premiere EHR software in the US. In recent years, we’ve begun expanding beyond the traditional healthcare landscape into areas such as specialty diagnostics, population health management, health plans, and more.

I began as a User Experience Designer at Epic in August 2021, focusing on clinical documentation, physician efficiency, and interoperability between organizations. A little over 6 months in, the interoperability team approached me with a problem that Epic had a unique opportunity to address: bridging the gap between health organizations and specialty diagnostic labs.

THE DOUBLE DIAMOND

The R&D lifecycle at Epic follows the Double Diamond process:

  • The first diamond covers Research - discovering & defining the problem to make sure we design the right thing.

  • The second diamond covers Design - exploring what’s possible and narrowing in on the best solution for our users’ needs.

When I first stepped onto the scene, the team was already well on its way to the second diamond, so I had to get up to speed quickly on the findings from their research.

DESIGN SPRINT

The first step I took to get the ball rolling was organizing a design sprint. This would get me up to speed, utilize what we knew to draft ideas, and uncover additional questions we hadn’t asked yet.

The sprint allowed us to accomplish the following:

  • Research relevant UI patterns to get inspired & meet industry standards

  • Align on our users’ goals to establish our guiding principles

  • Craft “How Might We” statements to align our capabilities with users’ goals

  • Make workflow maps to lay the foundation for our development

  • Create quick & dirty sketches per attendee to rapidly generate a wide variety of ideas

  • Review & critique the ideas to see what works in practice

DIVERGE, THEN CONVERGE

The design sprint helped us rapidly diverge on what’s possible, but the next step was to converge on what worked. Post-sprint, I met with individual developers on the teams to create low fidelity wireframes & prototypes to begin getting feedback from internal stakeholders and end users at customer sites.

From April 2022 all the way through February 2023, there was a lot of adjustment. Each customer call, internal stakeholder review, and design meeting with the team revealed more unanswered questions and assumptions we had made that would need to be corrected.

During this time, my responsibilities included:

  • Organizing additional design sprints for other workflows in our development

  • Iterating on the wireframes & turning them into high fidelity mockups

  • Helping determine how to get the feedback we needed from customer calls & usability studies

  • Working with internal stakeholders to understand what we could improve & ensure their feedback was addressed

  • Pivoting to address quality management concerns

  • Crafting communication & marketing materials like one-pagers and PowerPoint decks

OUTCOMES

Deployment times decreased by 78% from 6+ months to 3 weeks at a partner org

Check out the research paper here.

9 specialty diagnostic labs & 1 medical device manufacturer live or installing

Learn more about these groups here.

Genetic data exchanged via the EHR for the first time ever

Read more about this here.

DEV TEAM FEEDBACK

“I was always impressed by how quickly Dan got up to speed with how Aura works. I was really confused about Aura for a while and it still seems very complicated to me, but Dan seemed to really understand everything quickly and with confidence…

…He's a true member of the Aura team.”

“Dan has been impressive with guiding the R&D team members working on Aura projects. He does a great job hosting the design brainstorming sessions. He makes the sessions very interactive, first brainstorming to determine the use cases and the goals. He then brings together everyone's ideas for a solution and analyzes each one of them to come up with a solution that satisfies the goals and the usability requirements.”

“Dan has made himself available on short notice on a few occasions to provide suggestions on UX directions for Aura projects. This was especially helpful when we were trying to wrap up the projects but had a few UI issues that kept coming up. In addition to helping with new UI, he advocates to improve existing UI that is owned by other teams and works with those teams to get them onboard to make the shared UI better.”

LESSONS LEARNED

Being the lone UXD in the area, it was my responsibility to push back on decisions that were not in the end user’s interest. At the same time, I also had to learn when to compromise to accommodate project scope or technical limitations.

This project is one of many that I’ve juggled among my wide variety of functional areas I’m responsible for, so it was important to know how to prioritize projects and when to delegate.

There’s a time to be casual, and there’s a time to be serious. Balancing both helped me to build a sense of camaraderie with my developers that led to a strong design culture on the team.