Doctor Care Anywhere: Clinical Note

The project

On-call GPs and patient experience coordinators often have issues reaching patients when they need to contact them urgently. Due to the security around patient records and GDPR, staff would often have to go through a very convoluted process, which would often result in patients not receiving the top health care Doctor Care Anywhere offers. The clinical note project aimed to create an easy way for Lead GPs to contact patients outside of appointments while staying within clinical safeguarding laws.

What we did

Stage one of this project uncovered the current process and the issues that Doctor Care Anywhere staff have when contacting patients outside of appointments. Working with project managers, clinical leads and safeguarding leads, I mapped out the current process, looking at how patients are currently contacted in instances such as adverse test results, incorrect prescriptions and change of referrals. Looking at current workflows, we could create user stories and map out more user-friendly ways of working whilst staying clinically safe. 

From this, I, as the sole designer, was able to begin constructing low-fidelity designs. As we had a clear working group at this stage, we could create regular design check-ins with clinical leads for product safety and developers to forecast development resources.

The outcome of the first design stage was a workflow where a Lead GP could instigate a 'Clinical Note' from a patient's profile, then would then be taken to a consultation page where either call or SMS the patient through the web application. This also gives the clinical staff access to administer prescriptions, alter or add referrals, create sick notes and diagnostics test ordering. 

An initial round of user testing was carried out with Doctor Care Anywhere clinicians, and this helped us understand any usability or clinical issues early on in the design stage.

After our first round of testing, we created high-fidelity UI and prototypes, alongside this, we were still working with clinical teams to ‘stress test' the product in regards to clinical safety. During this phase, we had to ensure that our final designs had a solution for every type of clinical safety error. A final round of testing to ensure our finished design met both the needs of our GPs and our patient experience team.