Dermatologist Efficiency

Our dermatologists often need to document details about their assessment and plan for diagnoses in their visits.

We wanted to make this workflow as simple and efficient in Epic as possible, and had heard feedback that this was an area needing improvement. However, we didn’t fully understand how these assessments and plans varied (from patient to patient, dermatologist to dermatologist, or even organization to organization).

We used this project to gain an understanding for how dermatologists documented their A&Ps to help us find opportunities for efficiency improvements.

To kick off research, we took time to write down the high level questions that we had. These included questions like “When, during a visit, does a dermatologist diagnose a patient? Is it before the exam, during, after?” “Who tends to help with documentation (ex: does the physician assistant help at any point)?” “What tools are users completing these workflows with today?” and more.

We began to dig into these research questions with group calls of dermatologists with varying organizations. We found an interesting split in workflows (among other important details): dermatologists worked with their assistants differently - some liked to own all the documentation themselves, others liked the assistants to help document during the exam of the patient or during rooming. This would be an important detail to consider in design.

Before diving into mockups, we brainstormed on questions we hoped to answer in our design. One key question would be around how dermatologists work with assistants: “How might we design an efficient workflows for those dermatologists who have their assistant helping with documentation, versus those who do not?”

I lead a design sprint with the dermatology team with an aim to brainstorm on long-term ideas (not tied to constraints of our system). With these ideas, we were then able to collect sketches for immediate next steps that also set a good foundation for long-term goals. I owned mockups for this design. The mockups created were a little higher fidelity than usual to start, to ensure our dermatologists understood the story being told.

We returned to the same group of dermatologists with more UX related calls, this time to get feedback on our mockups and ideas.

Once settling on a design, and moving forward with development, we reached a point where we had collected questions to validate in development. These questions leaned towards task-based test and interview questions (ex: “Can our user complete a full assessment & planning workflow?”). Our product tester wrote and conducted these tests, while I assisted in reviewing tasks and analyzing results.