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It's About Time

Week of July 27, 2020

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20
Robert Floyd
Founder, Designer
Jul 28, 2020

I’m very pleased with the amount of progress we’ve made over the last week. As promised, I’ve got some new designs to share with you around our concept of Spaces.

As I mentioned last week, we’re redefining the product we’re building. The EHR is an outdated term to define what can be an amazing product. We’re calling our product a HealthcareOS. A HealthcareOS empowers work to be done well by getting the software out of the way of the user. I believe by building a HealthcareOS we will be building for the long term instead of the short term.

So, what does this thing actually look like?

For starters, the HealthcareOS uses simplified screens to present information to a clinician. The homepage, below, presents the “Today” view to a clinician with things that require their attention. Some of these things are “small loads” like responding to messages or reviewing pending orders. Some of these things are “medium loads” like Results. And some are “large loads” like Appointments, preparation for the next day, or responding to payment needs.

The Alloy HealthcareOS homepage

The key to the success of HealthcareOS is the use of spaces. Spaces naturally grow to use the available, well, space. Spaces encourage focus and flexibility in workflow. How can that be possible you may ask? Let’s take a look at the appointment space below.

On a day to day basis, clinicians will spend most of their time interacting with patients in appointments. These appointments may be in person or via teleconference. However, we know several things about appointments.

  • Appointments happen chronologically.
  • Appointments usually require a Chief Complaint or visit reason.
  • Appointments can have any length of time.
  • Anything can happen.

By building spaces around key areas of a clinician’s focus, we are able to structure them to help a clinician pay attention to their most pressing needs and actions. A clinician is presented with each appointment one at a time, but they can scroll or click through to see them easily. Each “card” shows key information about the appointment as well as the relevant actions that they need. They can review the patient’s information third screen below) or they can begin the encounter.

See that little plus icon next to the patient card?

That allows a clinician to add contextually relevant information next to the patient card for all patients. This way they can create a “stream” of information regarding each patient in a digestible and easily scannable way before each appointment.

Much of this is still quite rough but I’m excited about the possibility of how these spaces can empower clinicians to do their best work.

This week:

  • We’re continuing to build our MVP note-taking tool that we hope to release as a beta product later this year.
  • Fleshing out spaces
  • Data work

That’s it for now, see you next week!

✌️

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