OOO Manager
Offering a way for clinicians and managers to see when their team mates are out of office.
ROLE: Product Designer
TIMELINE: Oct 2022 - Dec 2022
COMPANY: Cerebral
PROBLEM
Cerebral’s current out of office calendaring system is time-consuming and cumbersome to our clinicians, leading to a lack of awareness of their absence from Cerebral by other team members.
Care team members at Cerebral are generally 1099 employees, meaning that many are contract workers working less than full-time. Despite varying hours and availability, there are a significant number of tasks sent to the care team members to review or act on daily using the Slack Channel system.
CURRENT PROCESS
To understand how clinicians currently request and notify team members of their out of office time, my colleague and I mapped out all the steps in a Miro board. From there we could identify some clear pain points, considerations, and constraints before fully diving into the project.
AFFINITY MAP
Creating an affinity map helped illuminate the pain points and areas to focus on.
BACKGROUND
HYPOTHESIS
The Cerebral team has created a complex management system to try to manage clinician OOO time and triage slack requests. This involved three separate softwares to request and track time. We believe that improving visibility into team OOO statuses and moving it into the Electronic Medical Record system (EMR) will decrease task resolution time by allowing teams to efficiently route tasks to available team members.
BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY
By reducing patient request resolution time and reducing admin time for care team members we can expect to see:
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Improvement in clinician efficiency and clinical quality
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Reduction in patient churn due to inefficient communication practices and long resolution time
RESPONSIBILITIES
My task was to rethink the out of office notification process for care team members and add automation to reduce human errors. I worked with a fellow designer throughout the duration of this project.
RESEARCH
I interviewed 15 care team members from various teams to see how they handle OOO schedules. The goal of the research was to understand what pain points clinicians are facing with setting their OOO schedules, and what information managers need to know for task reassignments.
I ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT:
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What is the current process for requesting and notifying of out of office schedules
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What pain points they are having with the current process
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What information do managers need to make decisions on task reassignment or next steps if a clinician is OOO
RESULTS
After conducting all user interviews, I synthesized my research by highlighting common themes and created another affinity map. From there I could clearly pull out key insights and form the design direction of this project.
“There's so many different platforms and systems and things that are changing. ”
“We're doing a lot of things to try and be more efficient and for clinicians to find self-serve and find the information better.”
Overall I needed to find a way to reduce the number of applications clinicians and managers were using by housing it all in one place (such as the EMR system) and make it intuitive for their workflows.
CONCEPT
USER FLOWS
Since there were multiple new flows and components needed, I decided to create user flows to understand the full picture of how this process would work.
My design partner and I decided to split up flows at this point to work more efficiently. I was responsible for the following flows:
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Clinicians requesting time off
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Managers viewing their direct reports’ statuses
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Clinicians viewing their team mates schedules
I presented the user flows to the engineering and product teams to discuss feasibility and scope. We held a few meetings to make sure we all left in alignment.
SKETCHES
Once I had a decent idea of which flows we needed to create, I started sketching out ideas with pencil and paper. This helped me visualize how the design system components would work together to build a seamless and intuitive experience that fit in with common patterns in the EMR.
DESIGN
HIGH FIDELITY MOCKUPS
When I felt good about the feasibility of screens and got all my questions answered by the product and engineering teams, I could then move on to high fidelity mockups. Some design decisions I made were as follows:
Clinicians requesting time off
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Moved clinician time off request form in to the EMR system so everything is housed in one place
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Included only fields that were necessary for manager approval/denial to avoid a long and tedious form
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Introduced process guidelines where convenient to help educate care team members on SOPs
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Trigger a warning if an inappropriate amount of time is requested to introduce automation and reduce feedback loops for managers
Managers viewing direct reports’ statuses
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Moved the approval process in to the EMR system so everything is in one place
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Ability to edit their team’s time off and status in the EMR in cases of emergency or if the clinicians forgot
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Can view all team members’ availability statuses in real time on a status card when hovering over their names
Clinicians viewing teammates’ statuses
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Moved availability in to the EMR system so everything is in one place
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Can view all team members availability statuses in real time on a status card
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Can view all team members out of office schedules to know when they will return
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Used common patterns already utilized in the EMR system to fit in with existing workflows
Throughout the process of creating mockups, I had weekly check ins with both my product manager and our clinical stakeholders. This sped up the decision making process whenever questions arose, and ensured everyone was on board with the direction.
Once the designs were in a good spot, I had many review sessions with my design partner to make sure everything worked together and connected seamlessly. When the designs were finished, I held final review sessions and gained approval from product, engineering and our stakeholders.
VISUAL SYSTEM
An EMR design system was already established, however I did introduce a few new components during this project as needed. I had to work within the system guidelines to make sure everything looked visually cohesive.
COLORS
Primary Colors
Warning States
Success States
Some new components included:
Time Off Request Form
Status Cards
Dropdown Chips
TYPOGRAPHY
Montserrat
Bold and semibold for headings
Montserrat
Medium and Regular for content
KEY LEARNINGS
FLEXIBILITY
Throghout the course of this project, the needs of the care team members often changed due to updated policies. I learned to be flexible and adapt to any situation that may arise.
IMPACT
Although my direct users were care team members at Cerebral, my work also impacted our patients. I had to keep that in mind through every design decision.
STAKEHOLDERS
Involving stakeholders earlier on in the process proved helpful to ensure we were on the same page working toward the same goal. There were no surprises in the end which sped up approvals.
OUTCOME
DELIVERABLES
Designed multiple flows making it easier for clinicians to request time off and for managers to track their team and assign appropriate workload.
SUMMARY
The process of requesting, approval and tracking time off was once a very manual process for care team members across multiple different applications. They were spending more time on admin work that was taking away from helping their patients.
By consolidating the process into a single application and using intuitive designs that fit in with their workflows, I was able to create efficiencies for clinicians. They are now able to focus more on what matters most - getting patients the mental health resources they need.
THANK YOU!
For questions, contact me at erinblumenthal19@gmail.com.
Or check out another case study below.
