Project Title

MedTrack

Health Records For All
March 2021

Building a fluid health access interface for patients- MedTrack

Built for
MedTrack
Role
Lead product designer
Industry
Health Tech
OS Platform
iOS (Mobile)
Team
Product Manager • Front End  Developer • Back End Developer • Doctors • Pharmacist and Lab Technicians

Introduction

We launched MedTrack to end patient medical data fragmentation in Africa.

In 2018, I set out on a mission to end patient medical data fragmentation for Africa’s 1 billion citizens alongside an incredible team of doctors, lab technicians, pharmacists, engineers and designers.

We believe patient health records should be easily trackable, safely transferable, progressive and secure. The mission is to build a universally accessible and portable health record system for Africa's citizens.

For reach in under represented and unconnected citizens, we are driving scale by connecting citizens’ health data to already established national digital ID systems. 

We have successfully empowered doctors to provide a seamless patient experience using our web app service and now needed to provide a way for patients to become custodians of the health data that has been generated. This set us out to build a mobile wallet-type app that will help users track their health information regardless of their primary facility, physician or location. 

Thus my journey began.

Project Summary

An opportunity to build a patient-centred experience that augments physician care.

The goal here is to empower patients track their health information and access critical data without the current bureaucratic barriers
In drafting a plan to build a decentralized health information system that travels with the user, I had to spend time discussing the possibilities and barriers with service providers such as community doctors, lab technicians, pharmacists and most importantly, patients on defining the major needs, complimentary use cases and nice-to-have.

In Africa, caregiving is hindered by communication blocks between patients and physicians. Siloed patient medical information and the general lack of patient involvement through out the caregiving experience is also a major contributor to this problem.

MedTrack allows facilities to capture a comprehensive picture of patient health information, medical history and other clinical data. We can design a solution that empowers patients to take control and have oversight over their health information.

The Challenge

Our inability to track our health information as easily as one's financial transactions

We have dedicated services to track every financial transactions in our lives. Why is it so difficult to track our personal health records as easily as we do our finances?

The current challenge stems from a lack of sharable information and oversight over personal health information data. During research, our stakeholders expressed concerns around these three key areas:

Memory gaps

When patients visit multiple facilities, physicians must rely on their patients' memories to make informed decisions.
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A key line of questioning physicians mostly engage patients on are around medication history.

Duplications

An illustration showing a doctor interacting with a screen for MedTrack
Duplicated prescriptions and diagnostic reports contribute to misdiagnosis, double dosing and duplicated tests due to incomplete records.
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A key line of questioning physicians mostly engage patients on are around medication history.

Tracking

An illustration showing a doctor interacting with a screen
Inability to track general health care data such as prescriptions and diagnostic reports frustrate basic caregiving.
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A key line of questioning physicians mostly engage patients on are around medication history.

The Goal

Build a portable health record solution to help Africa’s 1 billion citizens track their health wealth.

Create what will eventually become a mobile health wallet for Africa’s 1 billion citizens. A solution that will augment patient interaction with their physicians and other point of care services. The goal is to connect the three key areas under consideration.

Prescriptions
Diagnostics Requests
Clinical visits

Defining Success

01

Design to connect the 3 main key data points that influence most healthcare encounters

Prescriptions

Allowing users access to prescribed medications for information around drug types, dosages and Information around the prescription source should be accessible.
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A key line of questioning physicians mostly engage patients on are around medication history.

Diagnostics

Required by physicians to validate their investigations, users should be able to reference specific lab or imaging requests and its associated reports when required.
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Diagnostic report are a primary source of information required by physicians to validate their investigations.

Clinical visits

Giving patients an overview of their clinical visits. Clinical encounters should contain patient's information on prescriptions, diagnostic reports and clinical notes.
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Clinical visits will be designed in a way to give the patient an overview of each encounter and the transactions involved.

Ghana Card Integration

Successfully doing signals inclusivity for users who aren't always connected

02

Successfully connecting the digital to the physical

Design a solution that helps users connect their health information records to their national identification system, and turn these ID card systems into a physical version of their MedTrack app.

Patient Access Control

Ability to revoke physician access to specific encounters

03

A solution that gives patients control over their health data is a strong requirement

Due to MedTrack's patient-centered approach, a solution designed around giving users an overview of physicians list with access to their medical data is a key requirement. Here, users can control and manage access to various encounters.

SMS Receipts

04

Building on SMS as a baseline technology to reach unconnected users

For patients in hard-to-reach communities, SMS technology will be their default access point. In Africa, SMS is a baseline technology that is common and familiar to most service transactions.

user groups

Who are we primarily building for?

What demography will likely use MedTrack, at what point will the user most likely need to use the solution being designed and what use case scenarios will signal a success?

Primary user demography falls under 3 categories

Kwesi
Patients with chronic diseases
Agyeiwaa
Individuals who see concierge doctors
Pearl
Patients who travel often and as such experience healthcare with multiple touch points
Patients with chronic diseases
Individuals who see concierge doctors
Patients who travel often and as such experience healthcare with multiple touch points

When will a user likely need to use the app?

Most users will use the app as a point of reference when discussing medical history with doctors or other caregivers.

How easily will users interpret information?

Glanceability was a key factor in determining certain design queues and choices. Using average day phrases and queues was also an important component to improve information assimilation.

What does success mean to a user?

There are three key success points; mapping medical information to a particular encounter date and time, proper tracking of medication dispensation and diagnostic report and lastly, securely sharing access to this information with physicians who may not be your primary caregiver.

The Solution / Explorations

Designing a solution that increases patient oversight and participation in caregiving.

01

There are 4 primary key areas of focus

Prescriptions
Diagnostics
Clinical visits
Health Data

Physicians and facilities are already generating patient data using the MedTracks web app. These data are centered around patient's prescription history, diagnostic reports (lap and imaging data) and clinical visits. The goal here is to provide a way for patients to become custodians of the health data that is being generated.

Originally not included was the Health Data section, which was later planned to serve as an engagement gateway for first time users. Here, the system could serve users with curated content based on the data they share. Tips on chronic disease management and other health tips can be good strategy to engage these groups.

03

Component logic

Here, I designed high-level building blocks as components to help speed up design work throughout the app. Creating these components was also a great way to quickly test and swap out various ideas.

These were designed so styling could translate easily for the different OS and still maintain a native feel. Keeping this in mind, large element of the final design choices had to work for both iOS and the Android operating system.

Main header component

Enhancing attention by using animations cues to highlight notification prompts that requires a users attention

Prescription component

Typography was a great way to emphasis information hierarchy for users when skimming through their prescription details

Header title component

Bold and clearly labelled header titles were used to help users navigate content sections easily

Section component

Using this layout as opposed to a tabbed option meant additional explanatory copy could be provided for each section title

04

How I approached aligning the brand

Colour Style Guide

Slight variations were made to the main brand palette due to the high mobile pixel density. The three primary colour were largely maintained as is.

Iconography

Here, I explored two icon styles. A rounded-edge style to reflect a friendly approach but ultimately settled on a more formal, sharp-edge approach as it fitted the overall theme better.

Typography guide

I set type guides about 10% into my high level screens . The reason for doing this so early was to set limitations for the various typography options I was exploring.

Spacing guide

Using consisted spacing unit of 8px as the base value and setting the ratio to 1 allowed me to create a consisted spacing rhythm. This is particularly important to maintain visual consistency.
Colour coded ward inspiration - Photo of Ridge Hospital, Ghana

05

Clinical visits. Designing to strengthen muscle memory

Visiting the 600-bed-capacity Ridge Hospital was a great source of inspiration for this design choice. Ridge colour codes its ward to help patients and staff navigate the large multi-floor facility.

The idea was to reflect this in-app to help build muscle memory and reduce navigation guesswork for a better user experience.

Data request

In-app experience for when a physician requests access to a patient's medical data
🤓
Geek out!

06

Granting physician access

When a user decides to approve access for when a physician makes this request, I use an in-app prompt with a subtle animation to reaffirm the user's action.

07

Revoking physician access to specific encounters

A great design cue was matching the red hue as a visual guide to connect the the lock icon and the required action ofRevoking a physician's access.

Patient Access Control

Easily revoke physician access to specific encounters

Ghana Card Integration

🤓
Geek out!

08

Reducing data entry errors

I broke the input fields down into blocks to match the Ghana Card numbering sequence and spacing - GHA 000 000 00 . The design decision here is to visually aid data entry and improve user experience with an added benefit of reducing entry errors.

09

Patient diagnostic data structure

I had started a conversation with physicians around patient diagnostics, the level of information required when consulting with patients, and how this information should be organized. The patient-physician information requirements were mostly centered around the type of request and its associated reports that would be needed to fulfil their investigations.

The three conversation areas were:

Investigation Type

List of diagnostic investigations requested by your physician

Report Attachments

Document attachments uploaded by diagnostic center

Requesting Physician

Physician name, date and time generated option to evoke extra details

10

Prescription overview. Mapping prescriptions to encounters

Labels and dosage information were among the most frequently discussed points of interest during my time with patients and physicians. Being able to clearly convey information here was a major point of focus.

Here, I designed elements to prioritise clear labelling for dosage information and the encounter point they were generated.

Continues flow

A sticky header exploration was one of the ways to make sure users were always aware which prescriptions tied to their encounters.

Mapping prescriptions to source

This was a great way to connect prescription information to their encounter source. Solving one of the main challenges of designing for information loop.

12

Bringing these together

Conclusively, these came together pretty well. A clear, well-labelled visual interface experience with an excellent information hierarchy and a strong visual brand. Subtle visual animations improved user experience.

PIN Code access setup
Sections for main action points
Encounter details
User-access control
Patient prescriptions listings
User settings

Mapping prescriptions to source

13

Summary and learnings

It was such an honour to be part of this project. Working on products that have direct effect on millions of lives are always a welcome challenge. Brainstorming through some of the solutions we came up with as a team was a great way to learn and contribute.

As a team, we quickly learnt that, our solution needed to present data in its simplest format. Removing all data distractions and only show relevant information to the user was a key requirement we weren't open to compromise on.

In terms of decisions I would have made differently, one area I'll definitely take a look at is our initial onboarding flow where we collect patient's health data such as allergies, blood groups and pre-existing conditions. A solution that makes sharing this information feel more natural would be a great one to explore. Hopefully I can do this for our next updates.

Definitely get in touch if you want to learn more.

Get in touch