Amedisys Home Healthcare Electronic Health Record

Approach

As part of a small team, we each had to wear a number of different hats as well as work with a rather large team of developers, project managers, visual designers and business analysts. In addition, we had internal stakeholders from Amedisys we employed a participatory design methodology with. Weekly reviews were conducted and our team was on-site weekly to present new features and ensure requirements were met.

User research involved observations, persona development and semi-structured interviews to validate written requirements.  Wireframe development was non-stop and we used them as a discussion tool iterating early and quickly.

This project was conducted on-site in Baton Rouge requiring extensive travel to our client’s home office as well as online collaboration when needed.

Project Components

Home healthcare is a complex industry requiring our team to spend significant time with stakeholders and nurses understanding how the current system did not meet their needs and what we could do to address those in our design efforts. There were a number of areas our team determined could use improvement.

Scheduling Appointments

Scheduling was an arduous task for most nurses and doctors. It was not merely the interface that posed problems and proved time consuming. Medicare and Medicaid regulations often dictated the number of visits a healthcare professional could make within a given timeframe and this also related to compensation. However, the number of visits also needed to align with the medical literature in terms of giving the best care (i.e. how frequent and the frequency of visits to maximize efficacy of care). Nurses and doctors needed a quick method to plot visits that would compute the math for them. We built several complex scheduling systems employing logic so our users could plot visits over the approved and federally mandated 90 day care cycle.

Scheduling Professionals

Scheduling on-call personnel and active professionals were also activities needing improvement to ensure local offices could maintain adequate coverage. This was not only an activity pertinent to patient safety and care, but also one that could provide bottom-line savings through ensuring the appropriate number of staff were scheduled, but the local office did not overschedule members. We built a number of wireframes and prototypes for scheduling staff availability with complex logic behind them and profile information allowing schedulers to quickly contact staff members when needed.

Form Design

Healthcare is rife with forms, paperwork and administrative tasks. We devoted a considerable amount of research to understand exactly what professionals needed and designed dozens of forms to comply with federal and local mandates accounting for print views and digital views of the information entered. We also designed forms that were able to be quickly scanned and completed for healthcare professionals to maximize their time spent entering data.

Wireframe Samples