ThoroughCare

I worked directly with ThoroughCare's engineering team to get an understanding of the technical scope of the transition from their current framework to the Bootstrap framework. Secondly, I became familiar with ThoroughCare's two users groups: Healthcare providers and their patients.

The Users

Patients
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ThoroughCare's software specifically tended to the needs of patients with chronic illnesses, such as arthritis, diabetes, and hypertension. During this process, we needed to take two things into consideration: Chronic illness sufferers can be of any age, though Senior citizens tend to suffer from chronic illness at a higher rate. Which means any patient-facing interface needs to be accessible to older users Chronic illness patients risk further health risk do to lack of consistent, chronic care, so we want to ensure that patients can get consistent feedback between healthcare visits.
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Caregivers & Healthcare Providers
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ThoroughCare defined caregivers as any individual or groups of individuals who might have a connection to patient care. Caregivers could be someone who owns their own practices and manages a team of

Key Problems

For healthcare providers, ThoroughCare simply transferred many of the same issues caregivers had managing their practices with physical systems to a digital space. The most basic features, such as reviewing recent patient measurements, like blood sugar and weight, were nested within multiple menus and options with no clear way to navigate between different features and patient records in a timely manner. To address this, ThoroughCare wanted to implement:
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‍Patient alerts:

Alerts to caregiver that a patient has missed an important measurement, has an unusually high or low reading, or has upcoming appointments and assessments
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‍Improved Care Planning:    
The previous planning option was confusing and difficult to manage. There was no way to quickly access changes and notes within a care plan during a specific time frame or date.

Improvements

Patient Profiles & Alerts

Before we properly tackled Patient Alerts, we needed to make navigating a Patient's Profile more effective. The original Patient Profile was outdated and cramped. Relevant patient information took up far more space than necessary, forcing the modules and tabs that caregivers needed to use to the bottom of the page. The module, itself, did not resize when it was overfilled and the patient information was also present. This made it extremely difficult for caregivers to complete tasks and thoroughly address patient needs.

We wanted to focus on the actual content surrounding a patient's care which meant allowing the space and functionality to navigate a specific patient's care. The existing software required users to go through several main menus to get to a list of patients. In order to view a different patient's information, you have to repeat the process, multiple times. With the new navigation, caregivers could easily move between patients, patient information, and more. With the Patient Profile improvements, we now had the real estate to implement Patient Alerts. Each alert includes: an alert type (Appointment, Missed Reading, Upcoming Reading, Warning); a priority status so caregivers understand the severity of the alert and whether it needs immediate attention; as well as information regarding the date, time, who is responsible for follow-up, and if the message has been reviewed. It was important to make a distinction between New Alerts and All Alerts to emphasize importance and urgency that is often overlooked when it comes to treating chronic illnesses during off-hours.

Care Planning

Regarding the functionality of the Care Plan feature, referred to as the Time Logger, ThoroughCare was not prepared for a complete overhaul of feature. However, there were some blatant experience issues with existing system. As you can see below, the existing layout simply put any and all features of the Time Logger present on the page. Users reported several issues with understanding what they were looking at, what certain modules did, and, most importantly, they had reported several mistakes due to confusion over navigation. It would appear that both Care Plan Review and Provider Review are selected, with the top and bottom columns corresponding to both selections, neither of which is true. To address this, we followed similar design changes we implemented for the Patient Profile.