PharmaConnect
Overview
Empower patients to conveniently order, renew, and manage prescriptions.
PharmaConnect is a mobile and online web service where patients can manage their medications and pharmacy orders for themselves and/or their dependents. I was the primary designer involved in this project end-to-end, driving a majority of the design activities.
1 x Interaction Designer
1 x Product Strategist
12 x Developers
Wireframes
Visual Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Key Details
Key Challenges
- Unpredictable technical functionality from third-party software can erode patient trust.
- Disjointed sign-up process for patients who begin their journey at the pharmacy.
- Learnability challenges for non-technical patients who don’t have pharmacists to immediately help them in their workflow.
- Communication through application is vague and non-conversational.
- Balancing better patient experience with compliance to pharmacy policies.
Key Opportunities
- Provide as much detailed and personalized information to patients.
- Foster the unique patient-pharmacist relationship where they can rely on one trusted source for advice.
- A more patient-friendly interface for identifying and organizing medication.
- Find opportunities to patch up the disjointed user experience found in the healthcare system.
- Improving utility of digital products so pharmacists can spend more time on in-person patient care.
Key Feature
Allow patients to refill and manage prescriptions online.
Patient-friendly order statuses are used to maintain semblance of the pharmacist-patient interaction.
Remembering the purpose behind every drug can be difficult. Patients are able to add a label in PharmaConnect as a reminder to what that drug does. In addition, they’re able to access drug information from a trusted source, just like talking to a pharmacist.
Key Feature
Receive real-time order statuses and reminders.
Patients can view which prescriptions require immediate attention when they open the application (e.g., need refills, ready for pick up, etc.).
Patients receive contextual automated reminders for their prescription refills, allowing them to take action without needing to call their pharmacist.
Key Feature
Support for caregivers.
Patients are able to create and link their profiles and prescription list to their preferred pharmacies that use PharmaConnect. This can extend to multiple dependents whether it be a child, parent, or pet. From there, PharmaConnect will remind patients when it’s time for a refill, and allow them to conveniently request one right away.
Process (TL;DR)
Research & Discovery
Identifying high-level goals, needs, and scenarios.
Our discovery activities included stakeholder, SME, and user interviews. A comparative analysis was used to support some of our findings as well. Through our synthesized research and gap analysis, our team was able to narrow down some key challenges and opportunities.
Blueprinting
Tackling a complex application across three ecosystems.
PharmaConnect needed to be accessible to the masses. To ensure that, our team had to design the application for iOS, Android, and make it mobile responsive for web. That meant capturing the interaction + UI nuances between each ecosystem.
Our team started off by capturing flows including 50 error states that could occur during communication between PharmaConnect and the software used by pharmacists via wireframes.
High-fidelity prototyping
Consolidating two disparate design systems into one cohesive forefront.
TELUS and TELUS Health had multiple design systems being used across their products. As part of our design process, we took time to understand their ecosystem to propose design patterns that are both familiar to their customers and aligned with best practices.
As this was a health-related product, we needed to ensure the experience met WCAG 2.0 accessibility requirements. I worked with an accessibility consultant on a regularly basis to design and QC the final interface. In doing so, I eventually became the resident expert on design accessibility, championing more integration of design accessibility best practices within the org.
Outcomes
Decrease in patient phone calls to pharmacies.
Patients weren’t the only ones who benefitted from using PharmaConnect. Pharmacists now have a streamlined prescription workflow as a result of the increasing app usage.
For example, Barry—owner and pharmacist—
has since experienced an estimated decrease of 5-10% in patient phone calls. These time savings free Barry and his team to focus on other critical patient services.