Epic Systems

The pandemic created a complete shift in how health organizations provided care for their patients. Health systems were overloaded with COVID-19 patients, and the general public was ordered to stay home. But those with other conditions and health issues still need the care they need to be healthy. Video visits blew up overnight as a response to this problem. Some health systems went from roughly 50 video visits a month in 2019 to several thousand a month during the pandemic. Even after the height of the pandemic, video visits are still heavily utilized to see more patients and meet them where they are. Epic's video client was built in response to the pandemic, but video visits are seeing their use shift, and new challenges arise:

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• Workflows need to be adaptive to the specific type of visit that is taking place and the sort of controls the moderator would need.
• UX patterns need to be intuitive, both to users with moderator controls and those whom the moderation impacts. 
• The pandemic caused a heavy reliance on video calling platforms, all with their own set of standards and patterns laid out that users are used to. Our software needs to be easy to learn and fall-in-line with what our users are accustomed to. 

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The team and I were the ones who formed the workflows to address these challenges.

I wore many hats during this project but the core roles I held were UX designer and user-centered design consultant. I had my hands in creating mockups, providing input on research, strategizing our user interviews, and iterating on the UI in response to our studies. I can't dive into full details about our process, but rest assured our incredible research and development team on this project were diligent in our approach. We focused on in-depth interviews and research to ensure our solution would tackle real-world use cases. After designing for said use cases, we validated our solutions through multiple usability studies and iterating on the UI based on those studies. I'm proud of the process our team had given the urgency of the project.

Video visits on our video client jumped by 40%after this project went into production. We opened the door for new forms of video visits to be hosted and integrated into the largest EHR software in the country. This created less time spent charting for physicians and more care for patients. 

Working on this project was a huge privilege. I got to work with such a dedicated and astute team on work that helped reimagine the care that health systems can provide patients.

Health IT is complex and full of niche workflows. Being able to bring simplicity and familiarity to users was incredibly fulfilling.