The main goal of this interview is getting information about the Hospital Management System , the business goal, the competitors, the constrains
The goal of my market research was to uncover modern Trends in healthcare Industry. The healthcare Industry has become aggressive and complex because of the escalating cost, intense competition, a larger number of choices, and growing dissatisfaction among patients, which means that the healthcare service providers need to operate strategically. The success of a healthcare organisation now relies largely on competitive intelligence, market knowledge, and strategic planning. Current trends in healthcare that are shaping the industry are Putting patients first, Digitalisation of healthcare, Privacy Becomes More Important and Implementation of Technological Advancements.
This competitive analysis focuses explicitly on most relevant competitors. Relevancy, in this case, is defined by similarity in the scale of hospitals we are targeting on.
In order to produce an insightful design for DrApps, and keeping the budget and time constraints in mind, We employed a qualitative methods of user research:
In the two mid-sized multi specialty hospitals in Bangalore that I personally went to, I observed the following department staff, as they navigated their way through the established workflow. One of the hospitals used a locally sourced software, albeit not as sophisticated as an HMS and utilized third-party softwares like ‘Practo’ for accessing appointments booked by patients themselves. The other deployed a Hospital Information System (HIS) that automates clinical, electronic medical records (EMR), administrative and inventory functions
We noticed that the systems in place required going from one page to another to complete one task.
We also observed long web pages that required scrolling was a hindrance in the users’ efficiency
The tabular data of this page seemed to baffle a lot of users. Based on our observation, the users’ eye-tracking movement was intense and often missed the information they were looking for via the given presentation of dense data.
Using the existing systems, the users could only avail of the polar opposite information i.e ‘Occupied’ or ‘Available’ - causing inconvenience to the patients who were asked to wait until the available beds were being prepped.
Typically the ‘order entry’ page manages the summary of any outstanding expenses by the patients.
Therefore to complete the billing process, the user has to switch from the said page to the ‘Order Entry’ page to check any pending items to add (Pharmacy/Radiology/Lab expenses, etc)
As commonly observed before in many pages - from ‘Admission’ too, the user required to navigate to other relevant pages. Which in turn takes up more time and cognizance than required to make such a simple switch.
We also observed that through the existing systems, the user could only assign one doctor per patient. In the event of unavailability of the doctor, another cycle of interaction was required that consumed more time.
We tested the prototype with one of the Hospital admin and a practicing nurse in third visit to our hospitals they where pretty impressed by the design and they gave us lots of feedback