Overview

Shortage Medication Manager is a web application by Omnicell that helps hospitals and health networks clients to manage medication shortage. Medication shortage is one of hospitals and health networks’ biggest problems because it can adversely affect drug therapy, compromise or delay medical procedures, and result in medication errors. Surprisingly very few effective solutions had been created. Omnicell noticed the problem of shortage and had decided to get ahead of the game and create a standalone product helping clients to tackle the problem. I was brought in for a 2 months long research project to kick start this project.

• Role: Researcher, UX Designer

• Tool: Paper & Pen, Whiteboard, Visio, Illustrator

• Duration: 2 months

• UX Methods: User Interviews, Persona, Workflow, User stories, Whiteboarding, Wireframing

Project Goals 

• Research medication shortage problems.

• Define product goals, scope, and main functionalities.

• Conceptualize solutions and create initial wireframes.

Challenges 

• The subject matter is complex and I knew little about it.

• There was a lot of ambiguity and very little direction.

• Time was limited.

Research Plan

I started off by reading internal reports, materials and articles I found online and talked to people who are familiar with shortage, but after close to two weeks I still felt overwhelmed by the complexity of the subject. I decided to create a research plan and set research goals to help me understand the problems and be more efficient with my time.

Research Goals

• To understand the process of how users are managing shortage

• To study the best practice/strategy of managing shortage

• To define the problems and pains that users are having

• To understand customers’ needs

• To analyze client’s current capabilities to support shortage management

• To find opportunities for the client’s product to help manage shortage

• To define product goals

• To determine MVP/features needed

Understand Shortage Process

After writing down the research plan I had a better idea of what to do next. I discovered that visualizing the knowledge I learned really helped me to understand the subject quickly.

Discover User’s Needs

I interviewed 7 interviewees from 4 hospitals, and learned:

Define The Problems

The problems and pain points of medication shortage started to become clear:

Problems

1. There is no central place for users to find data, record shortage history, maintain shortage information, communicate decisions, and execute decisions;

2. Maintaining a shortage list is currently a manual process and is time consuming;

3. It is hard to find real time data to help users to make objective decisions;

4. Due to continuously changing Shortage situations, users could miss changes that have happened and fail to act accordingly;

5. Shortage lists can be long. It is hard to prioritize shortage items based on users’ needs;

6. Communicating shortage with carousels and cabinets is a manual process and is not efficient.

Find Opportunity Areas & Set Product Goals

Defining the problems helped me to better understand the users needs. In order to figure out how our web APP can help tackle those problems I created a shortage management process flow to analyze the problem areas, and identify areas of opportunity, The outcome was clearly defined product goals.

 Product Goals

1. Provide a central place for customers to enter shortage items, find data, record decisions, track status and manage shortage.

2. Provide some type of automation features to help users with strategy and save time;

3. Provide relevant data that can help users to make objective decisions;

4. Alert or guide users when changes happen during shortage;

5. Allow users to organize or prioritize shortage items based on their needs;

6. Ability to communicate through client’s other existing applications for carousels and cabinets, so the alerts can be created and updated automatically.

Define MVP

I created user stories and MVP to link the relationship of users needs to the product functionality.

I presented the research results and MVP to the product manager, product owner and the UX team. They were pleased with the results and wanted to move forward quickly.

Conceptualize & Wireframe

Keeping the user needs and MVP in mind I started sketching workflows and wireframe concepts on paper, then moved to digital concepts for more clarity and details. Omnicell’s UX team had been using Microsoft Visio to create wireframes, so I adapted to the tool quickly to be consistent with the rest of the team.

Project Handoff

I presented my research results and the wireframes to the UX and development teams at the end of the project and received praise from the stakeholders for the work. Although my work on the project was complete, I recommended that they get feedback from users on the wire frame concepts to determine:

• If the overall design ideas meet user’s basic needs for shortage management.

• If the information is prioritized well.

• What they think about the general layouts and vocabularies/language.

• What they think about the timeline, severity level, filtering, sorting, bookmark, drafts, exporting and updates ideas.

• If there are any other features or information they would like to have or see.

What I Learned

During the 2 month long project I have learned:

1. In addition to understanding users needs, understanding the subject matter and business needs are also critical for product success.

2. Having a detailed plan and follow through can help clarify ambiguity.

3. Every team has its own way of working. Respect it and try to learn what works well for them.

4. Getting stakeholders feedback at regular intervals helps with making good decisions and moving the project forward quickly.

   Check out my other UX design works, or back to the beginning of the project.