UPMC Surgeon Dashboard
Duration:
Jan - May 2023
(4 months)
Role:
Primary UX Designer
Team:
Bill Guo, Grace Joseph, Tina Lin, Jamie Liu, Gloria Moon
Tools:
Figma, FigJam
Overview
At the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, a group of healthcare providers specialize in treating patients with Metastatic Bone Disease (MBD). This terminal cancer spreads to the bones from other organs, causing severe pain and bone damage that can significantly impact a patient’s mobility and daily activities. To alleviate the pain and improve the patient’s quality of life, healthcare providers conduct a palliative procedure known as intramedullary (IM) nail treatment.
After the surgery, most patients are quickly discharged and spend the next 3 months recovering at home. However, during this period, healthcare providers are unable to closely monitor patient recovery, which creates an information gap regarding whether or not patients are regaining mobility or experiencing pain.
My team’s client for my Human-Computer Interaction capstone course, the Mobile Sensing and Health Institute at UPMC, tasked us with creating a dashboard that will help providers better monitor patient recovery. I worked alongside 4 teammates on this semester-long project to answer the following question:
How might we introduce patient data to assist surgeons in improving the quality of life for MBD patients post-operation?
My role on the team was the primary UX Designer. I was responsible for leading the ideation and wireframing process. I also supported my teammates during the research and implementation phases of the project.
Problem Space
Before our team was brought on board, our clients had already discovered that an information gap existed and determined a need for a dashboard. They had also already defined the type of data that would populate the dashboard:
A wearable device (Fitbit smartwatch) that collects objective information on a patient’s recovery through step counts, heart rate, and hours of sleep
A weekly self-assessment survey (called PROMIS) that collects a patient’s subjective judgment of their quality of life using self-reported answers about their ability to move, the amount of pain they experience, their quality of sleep, etc.
It was my team’s responsibility to determine who would be using the dashboard, when they would use it, and what kind of data would be the most relevant to them.
We began by exploring who would benefit the most from using the dashboard. We visited the UPMC Hillman Center, where we were able to walk up and briefly interview providers, as well as shadow surgeons, to learn about their daily workflows.
From this contextual inquiry, we identified surgeons as our primary users since they have the most expertise on patient recovery and the most authority over patient treatment. They also faced the most difficulties in evaluating patient recovery during face-to-face interactions, like check-up appointments.
We also quickly learned that the surgeons are extremely limited on time. Because of this, our next step was to identify when our dashboard could add the most value to their already busy schedule. To accomplish this, we created a service blueprint, which illustrates a surgeon’s daily and weekly involvement in the post-operation recovery process.
Ideation
To kickstart our ideation process, we used an affinity diagram, which synthesized our research findings, and our service blueprint to pinpoint areas where surgeons face challenges. I led this phase, facilitating conversations during our meetings that prompted both evaluative data analysis and generative brainstorming.
After we defined these pain points, we used storyboards to depict possible opportunities where our dashboard could intervene, and we prepared for a speed-dating study with the surgeons to solicit their feedback on our ideas.
Unfortunately, we could not schedule a speed-dating study with the surgeons because of their busy schedules. We were also very cautious of over-exerting our users and losing buy-in, especially because we were working in an extremely niche space, and we knew their input would be more valuable once we started wireframing.
Since we didn’t have the luxury of directly interviewing surgeons to gather feedback, we shifted gears and asked ourselves:
“How might we get just enough information to move forward?”
This question led us down a non-traditional path. First, we trusted our client’s expertise, so we conducted a storyboard speed-dating session with our client as a proxy. This data helped us prioritize our dashboard use cases, as outlined in the “Final Prototype” section.
We also created a brief, asynchronous survey for the surgeons to continue moving forward. This survey gathered insights about the data types that would be most insightful to surgeons, and the results revealed that the surgeons were most interested in data that measured a patient’s physical functioning and pain interference.
With these new findings, the team had enough information to begin designing the dashboard. We started by creating lo-fi paper wireframes in parallel, which allowed us to explore a wide breadth of designs. After we discussed our initial ideas together, I worked with the team’s secondary UX Designer to translate our feedback into mid-fi digital wireframes.
With these mid-fi wireframes complete, we conducted two rounds of user studies to evaluate and validate our design assumptions. During these studies, we presented our dashboard to the surgeons and observed how they interacted with both the patient data and the dashboard interface. My involvement in these studies helped me to iterate and co-design features with our users, guiding my team to our final, hi-fi design.
Our top 3 insights that influenced our design the most are detailed below:
Final Prototype
Our final dashboard prototype showcases aggregated and individual patient data to address two unique use cases.
Use Case 1: Surgeons want to monitor patient recovery remotely
The Home Page is designed to help surgeons quickly evaluate patient conditions and identify any patients who may need interference.
Use Case 2: Surgeons want to use data to guide check-in appointments
The Individual Patient pages support surgeons by giving them a benchmark when discussing patient recovery during appointments.
The clip below is from one of our final rounds of user testing. In this video, a UPMC surgeon shows us how he would use this dashboard to facilitate a conversation with a patient during an appointment (Use Case 2).
Project Handoff
Our dashboard empowers surgeons by giving them enhanced visibility into quantitative and qualitative data points, allowing for close patient monitoring outside of the clinic. With the dashboard, surgeons are better equipped to facilitate data-informed conversations and provide more meaningful guidance during the recovery process.
During our final user study, our surgeons expressed that they wanted to use the dashboard as soon as possible. At the conclusion of this project, we successfully completed the handoff process to our client, and they plan to begin distributing the dashboard to surgeons at the UPMC Hillman Center during the summer of 2023. We are excited to hear about its impact in the coming months!!
Final Thoughts
Overall, my experience working on this project highlighted the importance of staying flexible and embracing ambiguity during the design process. This project addressed a niche problem space, which led us to face many challenges that prevented us from strictly adhering to the “traditional” design approach taught in the classroom.
For example, it was extremely difficult to conduct preliminary literature reviews and secondary research about the problem space because of limited existing information on this specific user challenge. Furthermore, the limited access to subject experts caused us to be extremely cautious with the frequency of our interactions to ensure we did not create user burnout. We could not expect to receive immediate feedback on every single design decision that was made, and it was imperative for us to challenge ourselves to continue moving forward despite this ambiguity. Despite the uncertainties that we encountered, I am proud of my team for being able to preserve, deviate from the norm, and create a dashboard that supports the post-surgery recovery process.