VA eHMP (2015-2016)
The Veteran Affairs eHMP was a 3 stage project to renew the User Interface of the Electronic Health Record and Practitioner Workspace of the platform used by health practitioners at the VA facilities.
Project justification
- Integrate various medical systems into a sole application.
- Bring the Veteran Affairs software to contemporary standards.
- Create the new application around the human centered design process.
Team and Responsibilities
Opportunities
- Make the application less heavy on the eyes as practitioners work 12 hour shifts watching it.
- Expand the application to have a practitioner workspace.
- Navigate quickly and safely across screens and patient charts (HIPAA Regulations).
Milestones & Guidelines
- Redesign UI completely.
- Adapt UX to new UI.
- Comply with HIPAA patient safety security rules.
- Make it 508 compliant.
- Take medical emergency information and density into account.
- Do it in less than a year.
Starting up. Defining new visuals
- Research UI Kits available on the internet
- Pick one with features that could translate to medical software.
- Streamline the kit to cover our necessities.
Applying the new visual language to the UI
This was the heviest lift for the entire team, as it needed to cover the entire application. It went on like this:
- Creating an inventory of screens.
- Applying global styles.
- Creating an inventory of widgets.
- Modifying widget look and feel.
- Applying new interaction patterns to some widgets.
- Executing HTML, CSS and javaScript changes.
- Exploring and creating new widgets.
Facelift and exploration samples
UX adjustments & new feature development
For the second version of the project, the team started to tackle new user requested features These were the most relevant ones:
- Making the patient search and selection an instant feature while also taking care of patient safety rules.
- Adding a Provider Workspace with daily outlook of practitioner tasks.
- Adding patient chart customization to cater to diverse health conditions.
- Adding note taking, and ability to order tests, imagery and meds directly on the patient view.
The Design Process
Feature evolution
1st Proposal
Feedback gathered
- Although the color scheme is more pleasant there was still room to make it less heavy on the eyes.
- Modify the Practitioner Workspace with diverse features such as quick patient access, system tasks, patient journey progress indicators, clinical tasks and other platform shortcuts.
- Enhancements on visual hierarchy of important patient information.
The final stretch
Final Proposal
A happy ending
All of the efforts invested on the eHMP project were applauded and cherished by our customer and our users. This effort ended up in the accreditation for the project re-compete to Accenture, which represented a contract for almost 300 million dollars.
Video Walkthrough
An 8 minute video showcasing some aspects of the project.