Task Manager

Automating task creation and assignment within the EMR system.

Role

Product Designer

Timeline

Jan - Mar 2023

Company

Cerebral

Problem

Cerebral’s care coordinator message system is difficult for coordinators to manage, is not connected to the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) task system, and is built on significant tech debt.

As a result of these problems, patients were struggling to get timely resolutions on specific requests they have submitted to our team.

Background

Hypothesis

If we integrate patient messages to the EMR task system and if we automatically assign these tasks to the correct team, coordinators will be able to triage tasks more efficiently and reduce client response times.

Users

Care team members

Care Team Members will benefit from this feature by increasing their capacity to efficiently solve requests by automatically routing to the correct team. This was the group I was representing as a designer.

Patients

Patients will benefit from this feature by experiencing reduced wait times and increase their satisfaction with Cerebral customer support.

Current Process

Previously, if a patient had any questions or needed assistance, they could message their care coordinator in the app on a continuous thread. The coordinators would then route messages to the appropriate person and create a task for it. On the care coordinator side, that single thread was extremely hard to track and manage, so we wanted to move toward a task system where 1 message from the patient equaled 1 task for a care team member.

Research

Before starting this project, I pulled data and spoke to clinicians to shed light on and confirm the major pain points.

I pulled data reports showing that long wait times were a main reason patients were discontinuing memberships with Cerebral
I spoke to clinicians who experienced the pain points in having the task system separated from the patient message platform
I met with patient app team to get familiar with the task categories project they were working on

This helped validate the problem and wrap my head around scoping for this project.

Ideal Experience

All parties involved held workshop sessions to

First map out the current experience to highlight all the touch points between client and care team member
Then map out the ideal experience and to make sure there was a seamless experience
Finally identify all remaining flows, not just the happy path

Scoping

By mapping out all the flows, we were able to narrow down the scope of this project. We divided each into MVP V1 and V2 designs to hit upcoming deadlines and give engineering partners a head start.

The two main scenarios were:

Patient messaging into Cerebral
Care team member messaging client

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.

Review Sessions

When I felt good about the feasibility of screens, I turned them into low fidelity mockups. I had meetings with product and engineering partners to review design directions and answer all of my initial questions. Once we were all in alignment I moved on to high fidelity mockups.

Some design decisions I made were as follows:

High Fidelity Mockups

#1: Patient messaging into Cerebral

When a patient messages in, a task is automatically created

A snapshot of important details on the dashboard page

Notification when there are unread messages

Show the patient submitted form on the details view

Have an individual chat thread with the patient on each task

#2: Care team member messaging client

Allow clinicians to manually create a task

Have a snapshot of important details on the dashboard page

Create friction to make sure the sender is aware their message is external

Record who opens the chat

Approvals

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 started, 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.

Some new components included:

Feedback

After launch we sent out a survey asking care team members how they are liking the new task system in the EMR.

The results were overall positive. The majority of negative feedback was getting addressed with other projects in progress at that point in time.

We also saw a 50% decrease in patient response times!

Key Learnings

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.

Summary

The process of triaging patient messages to the correct care team member was once a very slow and manual process, causing patient messages to go unattended for long periods of time.

By imbedding messages to tasks and automatically assigning them to care team members, I was able to create efficiencies for clinicians in completing tasks and responding to patients. They are now able to focus more on what matters most - getting patients the mental health resources they need.