Tollos is a manufacturer of medical lift devices and equipment. The client’s teammembers have a strong backgrounds in medical device monitoring equipment and wanted to bring that level of data to medical lifts and safe patient handling.
The Challenge
Create a digital tool using data from the client’s medical lift equipment that provides value to their customers.
How might we promote better safe patient handling practices through hardware and software?
The Solution
The speculative design solution utilized data from ceiling lift usage to provide analytics that enabled hospital administrators to take informed action in supporting their clinical staff. Hospital administrators that were interviewed claimed that with the data provided with this tool, they could cut workers’ compensation claims by millions.
Research
I lead interviews and card sorting activities with participants from hospital and non-hospital patient care facilities that used medical lifts. Through user interviews, we created journey maps that helped us identify user touchpoints with medical lifts. We identified hospital administrators and maintenance staff as the primary users. I also conducted card sorting activities with administrators which revealed key relationships between lift utilization data and patient care. This helped us design meaningful visualizations for hospital administrators.
Findings
Hospital administrators had the highest potential for impact in providing better patient care across their organization.
Administrative teams spend a quarter of their time gathering data about their staff’s safe patient handling practices.
Employers incur millions in costs due to back-related workplace injuries.
Maintenance staff often spend days locating broken lifts, only to find that issues could be resolved by clinicians who filed maintenance requests.
How the findings were addressed
A robust tool focused on aggregating lift utilization data to provide administrators actionable information.
Not all hospital sites are the same. The application is designed so that administrators can customize the hospital structure to reflect their department’s unit organization.
Customizable data sets would allow administrators to spend time on developing specific training plans.
The maintenance portal features user-friendly error messaging based on lift equipment error codes.
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Numbers alone are not enough.
Data the lift provided was dry. We needed experts to help us understand how the raw numbers related to quality of patient care.
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Administrators are innovative.
Onsite we saw examples of education tools and safe patient handling care indicator cards that were created for care providers.
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Sometimes its a simple fix.
A common problem maintenance staff came across could be solved over the phone. A strap on the lift was pulled and could be reset by a clinician.
Usability Testing
Users had limited availability for interviews within the time frame this project took place. Initial usability tests were conducted in-house with teammates not on the project. These tests helped establish design patterns for task-based user workflows and onboarding.
Phase two of usability testing was done with task-based clickable prototypes for two main user groups: administrators and maintenance personnel. Users were asked to complete a series of onboarding tasks with different layouts and language. An additional test was conducted to determine if we identified and organized the data in a way that empowered users to make confident decisions.
USERS ARE SKEPTICAL
Users struggled to understand how data was gathered and were skeptical about its alignment with their hospital systems. Effective onboarding and customization were essential to building user trust.
UTILIZATION DATA ≠ MAINTENANCE DATA
The same raw data used by an administrative user tells a different story to maintenance user. Given a fixed set of data that could be collected, user-validated delivery of that data was necessary to provide value to the different user groups.
Iterations
This was a rare opportunity to work on a project that was starting from scratch. The design process started with figuring out what the product was to delivering a polished visual concept and technical adoption plan for customers.
Conclusion & Impact
Working on this speculative project was both daunting and exciting, thanks to a strong client relationship that encouraged out-of-the-box thinking. This approach helped the client visualize their product line's potential and transition into the digital space. Our team set them up for the next steps in the development process. Unfortunately 2020 was just around the corner and the company shifted its focus to support existing customers during the pandemic, leading to the project no longer being funded.
Reflection
My parents both worked in the healthcare care industry, one an oncology administrator, the other a breast cancer research coordinator. I finally got to see what their day to day was like through an adults eyes rather than a kid listening to her parents at the dinner table. The healthcare industry is complex and slow to change. It was exciting to have an opportunity to work on new technology that would support administrators trying to serve their staff.
What I would do differently
I would dedicate time to exploring solutions that could directly impact patient care providers. This would involve understanding the factors that influence their decision-making processes related to lifting and moving patients.
Additionally, I would establish a better design library and system for high-fidelity work. Minor styling and layout inconsistencies came up during user testing and skewed test results. I’ve since learned how to to quickly build component libraries that facilitate clear communication among teammates and streamline the design and iteration process.