Case Study: Enhancing Urgent Care and Emergency Care Services in the USA | HealthFul.
Challenging the limits of traditional healthcare with innovation
Hey all, I am Uday Kumar Madarapu, a Product Designer based in the United States.
Introduction
Have you ever faced a situation where you have rushed to Urgent Care due to some health complication and waited for multiple hours to visit a doctor and get treatment, due to the long waiting hours your pain got worse, and this application comes into play during those scenarios. HelathFul is a mobile application platform that allows users to track waiting times in various Urgent Care or Emergency Care hospitals in the neighborhood.
Role: Product Designer — UX, UI.
Timeline: 3 months.
Tools: Figma, Zoom, Notion, Miro.
The Problem
This case study articulates the design solution for individuals wherever there is a medical emergency, people intend to go to Emergency care or Urgent Care near the incident, but they need to know the waiting time. Let us say they must wait for 3 -4 hours and if the patient is facing severe pain, then this can be a problem. Instead of this, they can go to any other urgent care where they have less waiting time and it is far, but it will be helpful, and hospitals can provide good service to the patients.
The Solution
Having a mobile application that can find user location with the help of GPS and show nearby hospitals to the users the application also shows the waiting time for that specific service provider. In addition to the above-mentioned point, the application also has an AI hospital-suggesting feature, which asks a few questions to the user and suggests a health service provider to the user, this feature helps the user in understanding where to go either Emergency care or urgent care.
If we can track the waiting time for rides in Disney Land, Six Flags, etc., we can use the same technology to track the waiting time for Urgent Cares.
Process
In the design process to make a User-Centric Design and make our product more user-friendly, I have used the 5 Steps of the design process. I started with user research to understand the problem, then defined a context for the problem which led us to generate vast ideas, from those pools of ideas I designed and prototyped the product and, in the end, tested it with users. I consolidated these 5 steps into 3 steps — Research Analysis, Design, and Testing.
Research Analysis
In this stage, I started the data collection process based on the data I possess, I conducted secondary research to find are there any applications that are solving the same problem, I have not found any application, but I found a few applications that are near to the application I am planning to develop but not exactly same. After secondary research, I did my primary research by contacting a few international students and Americans to understand how they feel about Health Care in the USA. From the preliminary research, I secured good insights, and it helped me understand the gap between the USA and other Countries in Health Care. There are a lot of instances where I felt the Health Care system in the USA is a lot more effective when compared with other countries. However, there are situations where the US (United States) can adopt different techniques from other countries.
Targeted Users:
- People Seeking Urgent or Emergency Services: This is the main targeted audience; individuals can use this application to search nearby hospitals with less waiting time and good ratings to obtain better health treatment.
- Ambulances: Ambulances can use this application to navigate to hospitals nearby with a good response time.
- Hospital Providers: This application can be used by service providers to understand patients and their requirements and to see the reviews posted by users.
Competitive Analysis: Competitive analysis is a process of providing strategic insights into features, functions, and flows by our competitors. This allows us to understand the requirements and it also sets a benchmark for the product.
Even though after my secondary research I was not able to find any similar applications that deal with waiting time for any urgent care or emergency care, I found 2 applications that are indirect competitors to this application — US Hospital Finder, and Web MD Doctor. I have analyzed all the features present in those applications and categorized them into 4 categories.
After completing the competitive analysis and based on my idea to solve the problem I was able to produce questions that can be asked to users regarding their experience with Urgent Care and Emergency Care services in the USA.
Questions:
- Have you encountered a situation where you or an individual you know needed to visit an urgent care center? If so, what has your experience been?
- Have you ever encountered a situation where you or an individual you know needed to visit an emergency care center? If so, what has your experience been?
- What do you typically do when you get severely ill?
- How do you decide when to seek care?
- When deciding to seek care and thinking about Urgent care or Emergency care, how do you decide on where to go?
- Have you ever faced a long waiting time in Urgent Care, and has it affected you?
- Have you ever felt frustrated with UC/EC?
- Do you think there should be an app that displays the waiting time of the hospital?
- Would you like to suggest some ways to solve the problems you have faced in your experience with Urgent Care hospitals?
- Is there anything else you want to inform us about?
- Is there anyone you would suggest we talk to?
User Persona: After interviewing users I have created a persona based on the user research these personas allowed me to understand users better. Personas are fictional representations of ideal users, allowing us to understand user needs, pain points, goals, and motivations.
Empathy Map: Empathy Maps is a collaborative visualization that is used widely to study and understand user behavior easily. This allows us to get into the shoes of the user and helps us in capturing knowledge about users’ behavior and attitude.
After understanding user behavior, needs, and motives with the help of empathy mapping, personas. I have created my first iteration of features that can be included in the application which can increase usability and user experience for the user.
Features:
- Displaying waiting time.
- Overall Rating for the hospital and the rating specific to the department.
- Doctors profile.
- Distance from user location.
- An Artificial Intelligence bot that suggests a hospital based on the injury.
- Appointment Scheduling.
- Push notification to hospitals regarding the incident.
- Collecting EHR (Electronic Health Records) or the patient and sending them to the hospital securely.
- Navigation to the selected hospital from the users' location.
- Navigation inside the hospital with map and legend.
- Notification to emergency numbers regarding the incident.
Design Phase
Sketches: Sketches are used to represent our idea of the application and how the application will be viewed by people. This is used to prioritize content, functionalities, and intended behavior of the user.
UI Design: After sketching I have created High Fidelity screens for the application. This allowed me to design how my application will be viewed in the real world. In this stage, I used assorted colors to show priority and actions that they will perform which enables easy understanding to the user.
Major Screens:
Screens:
Prototype:
Learnings
- Always design for the users.
- Whatever you think may not be correct, more often users’ needs are to be focused.
- We cannot solve each problem, so we conduct research to focus and hit the most common one.
- Always and always be curious to learn and explore new things.
I enjoyed doing this project because I got to learn a lot in each stage: research, testing, and talking with various people from diverse backgrounds. It was very intense as Health Care is a vast field and, in the process, I got to do a lot of research on how things run in the USA and other Countries
