The journey to refresh a legacy patient monitoring system

Role: Lead visual designer; Field researcher; Product designer

I was a member of a five-person research and design team that helped GE Healthcare (GEHC) accelerate the design of the next generation of their patient monitoring system. The software we designed served the needs of nurses, doctors, patients and administrators. The complexity of the healthcare space and the monitors’ crucial role required a deep understanding of the involved user personas and their goals, as well as the hospital environment in which these proprietary devices performed.

Research Because of the depth and breadth of this project, our work was divided into phases. To fully understand the fast-paced, high-stakes hospital world which depended on this product for vital, real-time patient data, we conducted months of research during our discovery phase. We met with GE teams to align on design, strategy, and current GE product performance; 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.

We found compelling data to support the need for such a redesign. One research study indicated that patient care activities account for only 19% of a nurse’s shift time, of which 31 minutes is actual patient assessment and reading vital signs. 

Design tools save the day

Design processes contain the tools needed to handle large amounts of research and data. When themes are not immediately presenting themselves, perhaps due to overwhelming quantities, design synthesis serves to rescue the relevant from the unimportant, and also serves to prioritize based on real usage.

The following storyboard was one of many props that we created to discuss the current user journeys with our colleagues at GEHC (this was a fun one). They were able to go through each step of our illustration of a likely and important patient journey, and give us feedback on a) whether it was realistic, and b) which parts of the process we could intervene on:

Synthesis During the next phase of the project, we synthesized our findings into conclusions about what the product needed to be, for whom, and why. From the high-level user journeys, we prioritized the most likely and necessary use cases to inform our design explorations.

Roadblocks

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, which helped us visualize the complexities involved, ultimately helping us arrive at one of our design themes, “Remote/Mobile monitoring can play a key role in care transitions”:

Design Framework Finally, we designed two phases of the product: a short-term redesign and a long-term vision. We laid out system, product, and interface designs to address the scenarios we previously defined, while exploring visual style and components. This design framework defined the relationships, purpose, and workflows of the elements of the interface, and explained key use case scenarios. 

We created product design guidelines and specifications for future work in this product system. This guidance included different patient density models, ideal content for different viewer contexts and distances, component selections from the GE Healthcare library, and colors to align with national healthcare color coding standards. Each element of the design was isolated, explained, and described.

We also created a prototype for a fixed viewer (attached to wall) in a 2 x 5 patient arrangement. Click to play a short video of how this passive viewer would behave:

Summary

GE Healthcare was struggling with the weight of expensive legacy hardware and software, which their clients (hospitals) had invested in, and were moving to a cloud-based system. Through our in-depth research and synthesis, we emerged with 11 design themes and visually designed, modular components using the existing GE design system.