Contextual Inquiry: Observations in the Field
When this project began, members of the design team team flew out to Camden, New Jersey and embedded with a case management team for a three-day contextual inquiry, observing our future users and the environments worked in. We wanted a first-hand understanding of:
- The Camden Coalition’s unique case management system
- The systems hospitals they served at
- The patient population our system would be serving
After every observation was transcribed, I began the important process of synthesizing those observations into insights about the on-the-ground user needs our system could address.
Case Managers User Interviews
Camden Coalition uses a unique patient-centered care approach of their own design called “Backwards Planning” that identifies social service interventions that stem from the client’s own goals, and works toward patient self-sufficiency. Their approach served as an inspiration to how our system could work. I had full access to their staff, to ask questions about how this system was applied in practice.
However, if our intention was to build a flexible system that would serve broader needs than this one implementation, we needed to understand how our system overlapped with other case management methodologies. I worked with my team to identify and interview several organizations working with extremely high need patients in fields like mental health, sex traffic, and homelessness.
Patient Self-Navigation User Testing
Since Camden Coalition puts patients at the center of all their processes, our system needed to consider the patient experience. I talked to patients and people with social service needs to understand:
- What processes could they drive, and what processes did they need help with?
- How could they tap into their community, and what kinds of information would need to share with friends and family to empower them to help?
- What does motivation look like for someone who keeps hitting walls?
- How can we build tools that enable people in need to “graduate” to full self sufficiency and self-navigation on the same system?
Competitive Analysis
I looked into competing healthcare patient-tracking systems that provided overlapping data collection functions, but found that most of them were complex, unhelpful, and time consuming. None of them were designed to be patient-centered.
The goal of our case managers was to motivate and collaborate with patients to take steps toward addressing their social service needs, so I looked to other systems that motivate goal-oriented action. I took the most inspiration from goal setting and task management apps that helped people organize and collaborate around complicated multi-step processes in pursuit of a single goal.
Synthesis
I used affinity diagramming to process all this research to arrive at our learnings and insights that would drive the rest of the design cycle. Throughout the process of synthesis, I was working closely with experts to check my findings. I worked with a social worker on our product team to understand more about the perspective from her field, throughout the synthesis process. I also met weekly with Camden’s team of social workers to share back insights that my research had revealed and incorporate their expertise.
Findings
This research helped identify the key ways that our system could provide tools that make it easier to navigate patients, gaps that were not being filled by other systems. Our system could be more than a single-grant data collection system if we could:
- Provide self-serve screening tools, so case managers could spend less time identifying patients and more time navigating them
- Build collaboration and communication into the system
- Leverage our data to automatically create personalized care plans
- Build self-serve tools so patients and family members could participate in the process of getting social services
I advocated that we design for our case manager’s workflow, and not just to collect data. I was also able to tell a larger story about where these tools could fit into the larger ecosystem of our product, and the doors these tools would open for us.
The research that informed this project also revealed needs that were outside the scope of this project. This synthesis formed the seeds of many other projects that are now underway. The AHC system was a huge and much-needed update, but it’s just a large step in the right direction for the company’s offerings. Because of this early research, I was able to prep consistent designs for future companion pages, which have now become the core workflow for all of our users.