Dental Documentation

In the world of dentistry, academic dentists and non-academic dentists have very different workflows.Where a full-time, graduated dentist will skip steps in planning treatments for their patients, student & teaching dentists dentists cannot - they do everything in detail, to make sure they are doing it right.

Our product had originally been designed for non-academic dentists. We didn’t accommodate the ways our student dentists and teachers needed to document their patients’ visit, and our new academic organizations needed certain changes.

We had to determine what our academic organization’s workflow looked like, how they compared to those that were not academic, and design a solution that fit well for both user groups.

We took time to write down the high level questions that we had about the workflows: “What steps are in a simple academic workflow today, and how do they differ from non-academic workflows?” “How do these workflows differ from org to org, user to user, patient to patient?” “What tools are users completing these workflows with today?” and more.

I helped advise the team in conducting interviews & focus group calls with our academic organizations to get a great understanding of their workflows during a dental visit and discussed they might vary.We also worked closely with our academic group to define success metrics of the project - what problems were important to solve for an MLP? What goals came to mind for the long-term vision?

From these interviews, we created personas & workflow diagrams of a simple dental visit for both academic and non-academic workflows, based off of our interviews & past knowledge of our current, non-academic organizations.

To kick off design, I took a bit of time to generate design questions.: “What are ways that we can design for simple visits to be as ludicrously easy as possible?” “How do we allow for the space & surface the right details for dentists to think through treatments for more complex patients?” “How do dentists phrase certain steps in their workflow (so we can match this phrasing in-system)?” and more.

I lead a design sprint with the core team, to capture their ideas for the very high-level workflow in sketch-form. During the sprint, we referenced our workflow diagrams, problems, and goals of our users. At the end, we voted & picked a couple of the high-level options that fit our needs best. I paired with a developer to make low-fidelity mockups of our solution, and iterated to a medium-fidelity from decisions made in internal review.

With these medium-fidelity mockups, we asked design questions to our end users via a series of over 20 calls (lead by a mixture of team members and I). These calls helped us iterate on our designs, ensuring we were headed in the right direction for a breadth of academic and non-academic organizations.

The product team has broken the project into feasible, incremental steps leading toward our final vision. As they begin to develop, I’ll continue to help assist them in research, design, and validation of each of these steps.