Electronic Health Records:
A Better Way to Manage Patient Data?

  • UI Design
  • UX Design
  • Work-In-Progress

Introduction

This is something I have been wanting to work on ever since I started medical school.

Having worked with electronic health records as a clinician for the past 2 years, I have identified numerous pain-points and limitations from existing software.

What better way to kickstart a new academic year and a MSc in Healthcare & Design than to build a new patient records system as a sideproject?

Device / Screen Size

I decided to base this design on the iPad Pro. Primary reasons being the portability and large screen size that it offers. In addition to this, there are numerous external add-ons that could be included (such as the Apple Pencil and keyboard) to aid in the clinician workflow.

Neat features that could be added could include things like eye attention detection so when the user looks away from the screen for more than 15 seconds, the device locks automatically.

Work-In-Progress

I will most likely streamline this post as I add new content to it in the future. In the meantime, I've showcased some early wireframe prototypes that I have been working on with their descriptions above.

I've put all my thoughts into spoiler tags so as to not take up too much space on the screen. (Sorry for the extra clicks for those of you who are interested in reading it.)

Wireframing Stage - 22/09/2019

This view is based off existing ED Trackers used in Yorkshire hospitals.

The yellow buttons at the top allow clinicians to filter patients by: priority, clinician, time in department, location, and status.

Status will display information such as "Referred to General Medicine" or "Awaiting Bed".

The grey rows will be filled with essential patient information including: name, DOB, age, hospital ID, NHS number, priority, presenting complaint, status, quick notes, clinician, nurse, pending status, NEWS.

Priority would label patients from P1-P5, depending on how urgently they needed to be seen.

Status would display information such as "Awaiting for clinician", "Awaiting bed allocation".

I've personally found quick notes to be the incredibly useful for passing on messages between staff such as "Awaiting CT ( ), Bloods ( ), then TCI".

The blue tab bar at the bottom of the screen will allow clinicians to switch between ED patients, my patients, messaging, resources, and settings.

This menu can be accessed by swiping from the left of the main screen.

This page gives an overview to the entire ED department, detailing the number of patients in the department, breach times, status reports, and more.

The patient view will permanently display information such as name, DOB, age, hospital number, NHS number at the top of the screen.

The blue navigation buttons within the header will allow the user to navigate between the different areas of a patients' record.

The grey sections below the header will display essential information such as the patients' presenting complaint, recent blood results, clinician notes, patient flags, vital signs, and status.

This view will display notes by clinicans & department staff. Filter + search functionality will be essential here.

In addition, a built-in word processor will be integrated into the app.

This view will display all recent + past results from the patients' record; highlighting deranged results and significant changes from baseline.

A graph will also be displayed alongside the data to provide a visual representation of the results.

This view will have an integrated view for radiology images. Utilising the performance and display quality of the iPad Pro to deliver high quality images.

There may also be an option to include photos taken from the device - such as marking areas of cellulitis virtually to monitor progress.

And finally, we have clinic letters, discharge summaries, and the remaining pieces of information that are essential to building a complete picture towards a patients' overall health.