Role: Product Design Lead and UX Researcher
Context
The Humana Clinical team knew they had a problem on their hands. They were seeing a steep drop off in retention of their home health care nursing staff, and from data gathered in exit interviews, they realized a major inhibitor to the nurse’s jobs was the technology and tools they had to use while on-site with patients.
In an effort to increase retention with their home health care nursing staff–who cared for patients with chronic illnesses that typically caused them to be homebound. Humana knew they needed to improve the experiences within the tools they offered their nurses. The Productive Edge Product Design and Research team partnered with Humana to help solve this very pressing issue.
Process
I, along with a UX researcher and a product designer from my team, dug into the existing analysis the Humana team had completed. We then built on it to get more detailed insights through contextual inquiries we conducted, where we could witness the nurses' issues first-hand to help identify the nuances of their behaviors, motivations, pain points, and needs.
Together we digested the insights from the research, learning that:
Nurses spent too much of their already limited time accessing disparate patient information across multiple, slow applications instead of spending time with patients
The data they needed quick access to were on different platforms that were not updated regularly and thus the data was not trusted to be a clear source of truth
We then quickly shifted our focus from generating insights to generating potential solutions via paper prototyping and collaborated closely with clinical teams (nurses) as well as Humana product and engineering teams throughout the design and research process to ensure close alignment with all relevant stakeholders.
We landed on a design solution that connected all of the disparate system’s data sources into a modular UI that could be manipulated by nurses to display relevant data for particular patients or patient types.
Soon we–the other product designer and I–moved into prototyping, creating two mid-fidelity wireframe prototypes that we conducted usability tests with nurses across two differing UI patterns. We quickly learned that nurses would want to save different states/views to account for different types of patients so the nurse could easily access that particular, relevant data set of patient information when on a patient visit.
From there, we collaborated to build out high-fidelity prototypes that aligned with Humana’s brand standards and conducted a final round of usability testing to gain feedback on the high-fidelity designs and the save states/view feature.
Results
The Productive Edge engineering team then took on the development of the new product and delivered it with ongoing collaboration with myself, the other product designer, and our Humana partners. The Productive Edge team received glowing feedback from the Humana Clinical team based on the outcomes this product enabled.
The Humana Clinical team saw their retention rate slowly climb back to what they articulated as ‘a stable rate’ over a 5 month period post-launch, and Humana saw an increase of employee (nurse) satisfaction, via eNPS, of 2.3 points.
Across all home health care nurses, Humana saw 106,000 collective minutes saved per day enabled by the new product.
The Humana Clinical team saw cost savings of $391K / year
And most importantly, the home health care nurses were able to spend more time tending to their patients, providing better care for those in need