Simple, elegant, and effective way of communication for medical industry

for Mocabell

This project started with a personal experience as a patient in a busy Emergency Department. My colleague left in a strange part of the hospital. He could only wonder who would notice if he had a question. Trying to make eye contact with anyone was difficult. Calling out with his voice made him uncomfortable. He could only wait until someone approached. Luckily, it was his nurse. Thankfully, his medical condition resolved at the end but we knew that technology could only make things better. So we decided to tackle the problem and create an easy and smart solution to make this situation better.

To have a deeper understanding of medical industries, it was necessary to partner with a doctor and nurse who is in the emergency department as the stakeholders. As the lead designer of this project, firstly I conducted the interview with the stakeholders to find out what patients want when they push the call bell. It’s usually one of four things.

• An alarm on a device is beeping.
• The patient is in pain.
• The patient needs to go to the bathroom.
• They have some kind of question about their current condition.

Of course, there are lots of patients' other requests but I just kept all those requests as record and focused on four things to keep the app simpler. Because the key of this app was simplicity, to be easy enough to use for all type of patients from a child to the elderly, these four things were enough to cover most of the requests from patients.

On the other hand, I needed to learn how nurses work when they got requests from patients. So, I studied nurses' behaviors based on the stakeholder interview. And I learned there are two states.

• There is a nurse who immediately or in a minute can take patients requests.
• There is a nurse who is already taking care of other requests that can't take new requests.

No matter what the nurses' situations are all the patients' requests needed to be clearly delivered to the nursing staff. So, I was using the same color & icon assets from the patient app helped the nursing staff distinguish all the requests with ease. If one of the nursing staff is unable to answer patient requests, other nurses on the unit can be notified through the “Team Player” function. A team player is a well-known selfless person willing to pitch in and help during times of need. Through the interface, nurses can act as a cohesive team as opposed to working in an individual silo.

By reviewing the current hospital system, I realized that the administrator needed an integrated desktop system to manage patients, nursing staff, and call bell logs. I analyzed all the interaction for administrator based on how the patient and nurse app work.

• Assigning patients and nurses
• Managing units and rooms
• Checking the history of call bell log

Adding essential features such as assigning and managing functions in a page with intuitive color & icon assets makes the administrator effectively control patients, nurses, and call bells without jumping around pages. Through our Unit Reports, administrators can see what kind of calls is being made, how many of them, who is responding to them, and when they are occurring. These reports can direct the utilization of resources and the redirection of nursing manpower during historically busy coverage periods, or address patient satisfaction deficits.

After all this work the apps successfully launched in the app store and this apps honorably won NYP Innovation challenge and has been featured in Fox 42 News and mHealth Technology.

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