Care Navigator App
Tendo is a SaaS start up company with a vision is to transform the end-to-end patient experience, support clinicians, and drive better health outcomes. This project shows how our team tested and gathered insights on a new care navigator app prototype.
Role: User experience researcher and strategist.
Team: Product Manager, Product Designer, UX Researcher
Methods: In-depth qualitative interviews with concept testing.
Skills: Research planning, interviewing, synthesizing, facilitating, and design critique.
Deliverables: Research summary and feature recommendations.
Tools: User Interviews, Zoom, Figma, Confluence, and Google Suite.
GOAL
Understand How Care Plans Are Created and Used by Clinical Professionals
For patients, a new diagnosis opens a world of procedures, experts, medical terminology, tests, and appointments. Care navigators are trained clinical professionals who help make sense of treatment and guide patients and family members throughout the care journey. Today, clinical professionals like care navigators leverage a combination of tools including electronic medical records (EHRs), productivity software, and third party applications to communicate with patients and coordinate patient care.
Our primary goal was to understand how care plans are created and managed by clinical professionals in order to iterate and refine early designs for a new care navigator app offering for Tendo’s customers.
Additionally, we sought to better understand the care navigator role, uncover gaps in our product, discover potential new opportunities and validate/disprove any assumptions and hypotheses held by our internal team members.
Research Approach
User Interviews with Concept Testing
Our team was interested in how care navigators create clinical care plans, the tools they currently use, and challenges they face in their role. In order to get feedback on our initial designs and uncover details about the role, we opted for one-on-one user interviews with concept testing.
Key Questions:
What does the care plan creation process look like for care navigators?
What tools do care navigators use?
Do our current care plan designs meet the needs of care navigators?
Question Guide:
I worked with the team to develop a question guide that followed a flow of steps that a care navigator might take when managing a digital care plan. We reviewed the mock care plan screens and added questions to each corresponding section. We practiced the guide internally a few times before talking with participants.
Participants
Recruitment
Because the care navigator app was not yet developed, we did not have any existing customer users. Therefore, our team leveraged User Interviews, an external platform for managing user interview recruitment, to identify five clinical professionals with one of the following job titles:
Oncology Nurse Navigator
Nurse Navigator
Clinical Nurse Navigator
Registered Nurse Patient Navigator
Exclusion Criteria
We did not include non-nurse or non-clinical roles (i.e., patient navigator, patient care coordinator, etc.), because the care navigator application was intended to support roles involved with clinical care plan creation and clinical decision making.
Logistics
Each interviews was ~60 minutes long, conducted over Zoom, and recorded for our team’s notes. Each participant consented to participating in our project and were compensated $60 for their time.
Findings
We completed five interviews in two weeks, with meeting debriefs between interviews to discuss the team’s observations and notes. We grouped similar concepts that nurse navigators brought up into three themes around care plan management. The three themes were: care coordination, documentation, and barriers to care.
Care Coordination
Four out of five nurses told us that most time consuming part of the nurse navigator role is care coordination. We defined care coordination as the activities connected to provisioning healthcare such as scheduling appointments, managing referrals, and all the back and forth communication between care team and patient, and care team to care team communication to address questions, concerns, and changes to the care or treatment plan.
💡Opportunities
What if we could create a consistent method for nurse navigators to communicate barriers to care across multi-disciplinary teams?
Could we streamline the workflow nurse navigators use to ensure seamless care coordination?
Documentation
Documentation is a key aspect of nurse navigation, encompassing patient care, care coordination, notes and barrier identification. All nurse navigators noted documentation as an important aspect of their role. Two out of five document in one tool (usually the EMR used at their institution) while three nurses said that they used more than one tool (i.e., spreadsheets, email, messaging) to document their work.
💡Opportunities
Minimize repetitive documentation from patient interactions (i.e. SmartPhrases).
Assist nurse navigators in efficiently sharing crucial information with the care team without redundant data entry
Barriers to Care
Nurses stressed the need to recognize, update, and convey care barriers. While they assist patients in addressing these issues, some barriers, like cultural or religious ones, need only acknowledgment, not solutions, to foster trust and clear communication.
💡Opportunities
Design a system that allows nurse navigators to quickly identify and recall barriers without need to dig deep into a patient's profile?
Ensure that cultural or religious barriers are acknowledged in a way that builds trust and clear communication?
Updated Design Concepts
The team revised and updated designs throughout the care navigator app. In this example, I call out the updated concept which enables care navigators to document barriers to care within the care plan by clicking “Add Barrier” then entering the description of the barrier to care. The barrier to care is saved to the patient’s record.
Final Words
Significance of Care Navigators in Healthcare
Care navigators play an essential part in helping patients navigate the complexities of healthcare. This project enabled our team to get a glimpse into the day to day work nurse navigators do to manage care plans. In doing so, our product team was able to move quickly to update our prototype that addressed the challenges brought up in the interviews.
Future Work
To build on this research, a next step for our team would be to gather feedback on the updated designs to our prospective customers to evaluate how well the solution aligns with our customer’s business goals. This step would help us to identify technical and budget constraints depending on the customer’s needs and priorities.