Redesigning a Patient Monitoring System for GE HealthCare
MY ROLES
Lead Visual Designer, Product Designer, Field Researcher
CLIENT
Cooper (Design Consulting Firm) for GE Healthcare
This prototype is a sample of our research and design work for GEHC. This shows a fixed viewer (attached to wall) in a 10-patient grid (we also designed screens for 32, 24, and 16 patients).
project summary
On behalf of Cooper, a design consultancy, our team of four did research and created a design framework for GE HealthCare for their patient monitoring systems.
GE was embarking on a major overhaul of its in-hospital hardware systems for patient monitoring. They needed to accommodate modern mobile use and take advantage of the benefits of cloud infrastructure. Patient monitoring systems are crucial to good patient care. The disruptions, usability issues, and alarms associated with poorly designed systems increase clinicians’ cognitive load, which limits task completion, comprehension, and decision making.
DISCOVERY
The complexity of the healthcare space and the patient monitors’ crucial role required a deep understanding of user personas and goals, as well as the hospital environment in which these proprietary devices performed.
One of our field research trips in action at a hospital.
Cross-team collaboration & field research
To fully understand the fast-paced, high-stakes hospital world which depended on this product for vital, real-time patient data, we embarked on months of research. We met with GE HealthCare (GEHC) teams to align on design, strategy, and current GE product statuses; we combed through a heavy volume of existing documentation; and we went into the field to interview and shadow users of the existing hardware/software product at several locations around the country, including the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and UCSF in San Francisco. We spoke with nurses and doctors on the patient floors and observed technicians in the basement, until we fully understood their current pain points, environments, and mental models.
Our team hosted a feedback session with GEHC in which we discussed our personas (top) and an ideal yet complex patient journey (middle). Participants added comments on sticky notes below.
Synthesis
We synthesized our research findings into conclusions about what the product needed to be, for whom, and why. From these high-level user journeys, we prioritized the most likely and necessary use cases to inform our design explorations.
Design tool: storyboarding
I created multiple storyboards to clarify themes based on real-life user journeys, a useful tool to rescue the relevant from overwhelming amounts of data. With this storyboarding visualization, we isolated each step of likely and important patient journeys to discuss a) whether it was realistic, and b) in which parts of the process we could intervene.
Patient journey visualization detail
The tangled, precarious state of affairs
While conducting field research with one of the nurses at a hospital, we heard about one patient’s journey from admittance to discharge. We illustrated this real story with the following mapping diagram, visualizing the complexities involved, ultimately helping us arrive at one of our design themes in support of alleviating the dangers of multiple care transitions:
CURRENT STATE: This diagram illustrated a convoluted patient journey, which involved multiple care transitions, at one hospital we visited.
Remote/Mobile monitoring can play a key role in care transitions
We re-envisioned the same story, but with a more efficient and simplified transition points using mobile devices to tap into real-time, critical information:
AFTER: Design for a streamlined care transition flow through “Axone”, GEHC’s patient monitoring hardware and software system, newly available on mobile devices
Design Framework
With our comprehensive final report, we showed a well-researched, evidence-based, and beautiful path forward for GE HealthCare.
We included in the Design Research Report a short-term redesign: a design framework that defined the relationships, purpose, and workflows of each element of the interface, and explained key use case scenarios.
Sample specifications within the Design Research Report
The long-term vision included product design guidelines and specifications for future work for the entire product family. This guidance included: ideal content for different viewer contexts and distances, component selections from the GE Healthcare library, and accessible colors to align with national healthcare color coding standards. Each element of the design was isolated, explained, and described.
Animated prototype of alarm behavior.
Summary
GE Healthcare was struggling with the weight of expensive legacy hardware and software which their clients (hospitals) had invested in, while trying to move to a more modern and modular cloud-based system. Through our in-depth research, synthesis, and design, we emerged with designs for a product system informed by market trends and enabled by technological innovation.
Was this ever implemented? Unfortunately, as with many consulting arrangements, we were not kept informed about where the in-house GE team took our design thinking, but I’m proud to have been a part of the effort that resulted in a solid body of research and design.