Ascension Surgical Scheduling MVP
Designed a standardized surgical scheduling process from request to surgery
background
Faxes, emails, phone calls
Many hospitals are still stuck in the age of faxes, emails, and phone calls to manage surgical schedules. And while those methods work, they’re simply not the best tools for the job today.
problem
Manual surgical scheduling
Ascension operates thousands of sites of care across the US, including nearly 150 hospitals. However, as of a few years ago, many hospitals were still relying on fax machines and email to manage surgical scheduling between offices.
This process is not only inefficient, painful but it brings a lot of risk when surgery requests are translated from different formats and across different systems.
Highlights
A solution to request, review and confirm surgery
Onsite user research
Current scheduling journey
We spent 2 days at Ascension St. Vincent, Indianapolis, where we conducted 13 interview sessions with 18 stakeholders.
Interviewed 18 hospital staff and staff of affiliated surgical offices
Conducted 6 observation sessions across the OR control center, and 4 different surgeons’ offices.
Findings
Where things break down
After interviewing key stakeholders and mapping out surgical shceduling workflows, it became evident that there were massive pain points along the way - the process is highly manual and labor-intensive, and there are many opportunities for improvement.
Blueprints have been simplified. View the original version here.
Findings
Opportunities
Redundant data entry and lack of access to data are pain points that affect all roles we interviewed.
Back-and-forth communication
Processes are highly manual and the details of each case are reviewed several times by several people to confirm and reconfirm that necessary steps have been completed. Back-and-forth communication is painful for cinical staff.
Multi-tools and poor software support
Not only is redundant data stored across different EHRs between surgeon’s offices and hospitals, but at St. Vincent, data lives in a transitional, communications-focused tool, the EHR, an earlier EHR still in use by some service lines, and the billing system.
We want to create a standard surgical scheduling process and design a one-stop solution tailored to clinical staff
MVP Scope
Brainstorm & scope down
Identify requirements and scope down projects
There are many things going on in the surgery lifecycle - from identifying available time slots/operation rooms, collecting patient data, tracking/monitoring scheduled cases, to post-surgery documentation.
Additionally, there were a wide-range of stakeholders involved in this process, including surgeons, patients, schedulers, and nurses. So I had to nail down the steps that we could intervene.
"We need to scope down to avoid scope creep."
Prioritize key user story
After gaining insights into the current workflows and key stakeholders, we held collaborative workshops to define user stories, establish the MVP scope, and identify requirements based on impact and priority. The MVP focuses on high-priority user stories involving surgeon office schedulers, hospital OR schedulers, and PAT nurses.
MVP Scope
MVP surgery scheduling process
After we mapped out the task flow based on their traditional process, we identified four key stages throughout the journey.
MVP Scope
FInal Solution
A centralized surgical scheduling platform that supports the entire surgery lifecycle, enabling clinical staff to request, view, and monitor procedures.
My key contribution to this project was designing the case overview screen: a shared workspace for office schedulers, PAT nurses, and operating room schedulers to efficiently monitor and manage surgical cases.
ITERATIONs
Iterations and testing
The key functionality of MVP revolves around the “case”. A “case” in the context is a requested procedure (either scheduled or unscheduled) that allow office schedulers, PAT nurse and OR Schedulers to track and monitor the status of surgery cases.
The most challenging part for me in the project was to figure out how to convey a useful amount of information in one place without entirely overwhelming the user when high information density was inevitable.
Challenge 1: How deeply tied should this be to overall brand?
The current Ascension brand is designed for consumer-facing and web marketing purposes. In addition to brand extension and exploration, I took a look at the role of color and its meaning within the clinical setting to ensure that I was not contradicting existing meanings for colors or icons. I referred to the OR control tools to come up with the final color palette.
Challenge 2: How to highlight critical case status and critical info?
Another challenge I faced was how to effectively highlight the case status for users navigating through case cards, and what critical case information should be included in the card.
Challenge 3: What is the best way of visualizing case list?
I iterated my design through critiques with designers and usability testing with hospital schedulers and internal stakeholders. I explored three case view layouts. My initial thought was to visually highlight important tasks, but testing showed users actually preferred a cleaner layout since it felt easier to scan and less overwhelming.
Final Solution
Request surgery
Office Scheduler creates a new surgical case and submit it to the OR Scheduler for review.
Final Solution
Add pre-admission testing results
After the Case is created, PAT (Preadmission Testing) staff schedules any required presurgical tests and add test results to the system.
Final Solution
Confirm surgery
OR Scheduler reviews the submitted Case, confirms scheduling details, and approves it.
Outcome
Results
The platform has successfully processed over 40,000 surgical requests, with continued growth as adoption expands across Ascension’s network.
40000+
Surgical Requests Processed