EMS Quality Improvement Tools
Tools & Methods
Contextual Inquiry
Axure
Balsamiq
Prototype
Team
Designer (me)
PO
4 developers
3 QA
My Contribution
UX
UI
Impact
Reduced clutter by 70% and reduced the time it takes to review a case by 30%.
How it used to work
A considerable amount of EMS agencies still utilize paper systems to record the events of an ambulance call. It's not uncommon to walk into a supervisor's office to see stacks of patient care records (PCRs) spilling out of filing cabinets onto the floor and other surfaces. The majority of 911 calls are non-emergent, real emergencies could be as low as 10-15% of an EMS agency’s entire call volume. Non-emergent calls can be the elderly who have been unable or unwilling to fill their prescriptions, the lonely who just want human contact, drug addicts seeking drugs, or the mentally ill. Only a small percentage of calls to 911 are appropriate for their services and only then are a paramedics/ EMTs skills tested.
This means that the majority of those stacks of papers in the office are noise to a supervisor. The quality improvement role of a supervisor is to assess if their paramedics and EMTs gave the appropriate medications or successfully administered complicated procedures for those emergency calls.
Problem
Users spend more time managing and sifting through records than analyzing the quality of care for emergency calls.
Process
Contextual Interviews
By using the employee information from the PCR we can have a baseline to run calculations off of. We can rely on it to tell whether or not there is a new employee, or if our calculations find a person that is unaccounted for, we can disregard them as they are likely a firefighter or another helping hand on scene.
Persona creation
Worked with team and product to design personas before the creation of the product to improve our understanding of our users and their needs.
Distilling user wants/needs
Through a series of white-boarding sessions, flowcharting, and story mapping I created a collection of deliverables that conveyed a problem-centric view of what our users needed that gave flexibility in the solution and implementation.
Solution
1. Types
create types of PCRs based off relevant criteria so that we can intelligently sort.
2. Intelligent filtering
Based on these types of cases, we can immediately sift through the incoming records to find the ones most relevant for the QI professional to review.
3. Improve what the user sees
By reducing the clutter for the user, they can quickly start reviewing the important cases.
Before
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It was difficult to find a case due to the lack of meaningful identifiers
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The list was of all cases that were ever collected
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It's impossible to know at a glance what type of cases they are
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Users immediately have to filter or search to find what they are looking for
After
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Added more meaningful identifiers so the user can quickly find the case they are looking for
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The list is reduced to a relevant time period that they would QAQI
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Users are immediately presented with the cases they care about reviewing
