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HEALTHCARE PROJECT MANAGEMENT TOOL
Seattle Children's Research Institute
As a part of something different for Seattle Children's, a teammate and I created a project management tool to digitize many of the whiteboards that were around the lab. It combined different aspects of existing project management tools in order to best meet the needs of healthcare. This was done through user testing of of lab along with usability testing.
Healthcare Project Management Tool: Project
The goal of this project was to create a tool that would allow for better task management in the healthcare setting. Healthcare has unique issues with management because a hospital is composed of many discrete systems that do not necessarily connect. This leads to difficulty in choosing what projects get priority between and within different departments of the hospital, which in turn makes it hard for all of these departments to keep track of their projects. In order to solve this issue, this tool manages projects coming from different groups and offers features that allow for advanced filtering and priority management.
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The first steps were to find out the desirability of a new tool compared to current systems, as many medical systems are entrenched and do not change. To do this, paper prototypes of the task management tool were created and shown to potential users. Once we figured out which features were better for the group, we moved on to a higher fidelity interactive prototype to evaluate if our systems worked effectively. This was done through a usability study with participants taken from Seattle Children’s Research Institute. In this way the efficiency of our system, and hopefully medical tasks as well, can be improved. This allows for better healthcare or research depending on where it is applied.
Healthcare Project Management Tool: Text
Healthcare Project Management Tool: Image
When looking back on any project, one of the clear issues that always shows up is time. User testing and prototyping take a great deal of time, which is why learning how to do it right is so important. Throughout this project I was able to get a better feel or the use and limitations of usability testing in industry, as well as learn about any problems that did not appear in my classes. The largest one is of course that everyone is busy, so trying to poll professionals takes a lot of planning ahead of time. On the more positive side, they know exactly what they want and the limitations of the current system. Working with expert participants offered a different view or user research, and their knowledge was reflected in the directness of the design. This allowed for more time to figure out the how of the design rather than the what, a difference from working with general users. All in all it was a different, yet useful, experience that I will take foward with me.
Healthcare Project Management Tool: Text
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