Next Phase of Integra’s EMR
Establishing EMR’s foundational framework.
During my first year at Integra Connect, I was a mid-level designer, under a lead designer, working on a new version of their Electronic Medical Record (EMR) product called IC-1. Medical offices use this tool to collect, organize, and store patient data.
The lead PM in Miami managed this initiative acting as the sole SME and senior UX designer, giving us direction on features, layout, and content. The team in Mississippi continued to support Medical Mastermind (MM), the original version of the EMR.
Due to a significant leadership shuffle, the PM leading us from Miami was let go, and a new lead was quickly hired. The new PM clarified that he did not know as much about EMRs and design was not his job. The design team no longer had anyone telling us what to design into IC-1, and with several opinions, multiple directions it could go. With this mess, I was about to be out of work.
During initial meetings, or interviews, about my role in IC-1, I thought I would be out of a job soon. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I spoke up about my suggestions on how to move the product forward from a design perspective.
This must of hit the right chord because, surprisingly, he agreed with my assessments and allowed me time to work on concepts and a presentation, while our lead designer supported any continued work on MM and IC-1. The presentation, including wireframes, would be shown at the next big meeting a few weeks away with all the SMEs in Madison MS. I had my deadline.
I presented several concepts that used different layouts to house the main buckets of work. I was nervous during the presentation to the SMEs in Madison, Mississippi.
I took the current “inbox” concept and location from MM and attempted to add it to IC-1’s current layout. Although this seemed to take the navigation in a better direction, it did not solve the overall confusion between the global navigation up top and the tier-two navigation on the left.
In this next version, I started expanding what I moved in order to accommodate different pieces. I moved the global “area” navigation to the left to buy more vertical space, which is again more like MM.
When the patient tab bar was moved up, we saw an opportunity to add a quick patient search in this area, which would follow design patterns you find in Google, making it pretty familiar. This was not a new feature, but it had been hidden before. I had seen it in past concepts from our lead designer. I just brought it back up and put it somewhere obvious for the user to find and use.
Once in patient context, I saw yet another opportunity to bring up and organize “actions” that could be done to a patient file, such as data entry and scheduling. This was once again another layout feature borrowed from MM but placed in context, making it more obvious.
The SMEs loved the concepts, agreeing the features/tools shown were important and needed. This was not only a confidence booster for me, but gave the PMs validation on what we should focus on moving forward.
Leadership and product management decided to develop the finalized design they could start building to transition from MM. They would use IC-1 as the foundational code. We unified MM into IC-1, later called “Classic.” The best features from MM, now in IC-1, helped the users, and we were all focused on one product instead of two.