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Lung Cancer Lab Software Design
Quick Note: I’ve been asked not to show any flows or additional screens as these are very proprietary software designs that the company would prefer I not share publicly.
Overview
While at Lightmatter, I had the opportunity to work with a laboratory that in short, is able to detect lung cancer in smoking patients via blood samples. We spent over 6 months defining and redefining the interface from scratch to be able to handle the entire processing of the blood samples from creating the original orders on the providers’ ends all the way to reporting results back to the patients.
The Challenges
Given there was such a wide variety of requirements by so many different teams software, the biggest challenge was creating a interface that was simple and clean, but powerful enough to handle everything they needed as they did not want to use disparate softwares for each team.
The list below encompasses the range of features that I was able to deliver:.
High Level
Overview of blood sample progress through system with legal requirement for very granular audits
Ability to move orders from step to step until order is complete
Communication and messaging across teams (via ‘conversations’)
Information error management via case creation (see right panel)
Provider and patient indexes with search and filtering
Uploads section for any documents/images
Ordering
Ability for Doctors to submit blood work prescription to phlebotomist on behalf of patient
Insurance & billing capture
Edibility of patient information per section/across all sections (see global edit toggle in bottom left)
Barcode creation modal for blood sample identification
Lab intake
Intake of blood samples including barcode scanning and sample
Error tracking and resolution (broken test tubes, dried samples, etc…)
Sample Processing
Quality Control metrics visualization to compare sample results to baseline
Ability to create holds on samples in cases of potentially faulty data
Data visualization tools and sample grouping (blood sample grouping is extremely tedious and detailed!)
Reporting
Ability to create and send results to patients and providers
Error management and resolution in reporting
This list above, along with testing across each and every team via clickable prototypes and flows, while receiving input from 30+ members of the company’s team was an added challenge. That said, this was hands-down one of my favorite projects given the complexity and problem-solving.
The outcome
I worked in tandem with the engineering team to essentially develop the application in real time. The timeline was extremely short for the list of ever-growing requirements, but after 6 months, the software was already built and functioning based on my designs. I was also able to deliver a full software design guideline along with templates for any future requirements they may have come across. I spoke with their team recently and it sounds like they are still using the designs I’ve created and have used my guidelines to build more features into their pipeline.
My Takeaway
My experience in branding and visual design, including icons, logos, websites, and marketing materials, has been incredibly rewarding. I've seen my work featured on NYC Subway ads, prominent billboards, and even in Google's early icon collection.
This project helped me find an deeper interest for complex, multi-dimensional problem-solving that demands collaboration with bigger teams. I’m very proud of the work we did in delivering a solid foundation for the company to grow with.
Clinical Trial Software Design
Note: Like a lot of the work I did on healthcare software, I am not allowed to show very much! If you’d like to see where the company is now, you can go to their site here to see an expansion on foundation of work I did.
Overview
While I was at Lightmatter, I worked with Lokavant, a company that manages and tracks clinical drug trials, with a special focus on Serious Adverse Events (SAEs). The FDA defines SAEs as “An adverse event is any undesirable experience associated with the use of a medical product in a patient. The event is serious and should be reported to FDA when the patient outcome is death, hospitalization, disability, permanent damage, birth defects, [etc..].”
I was tasked with both designing and defining the user interface as well as conducting user research using clickable prototypes to gather feedback on the interfaces I had designed.
The Challenge
We were given an extremely short 8 week timeline to design an interface that both acted as a full-scale clinical study management tool as well as allowed users to report and manage detailed SAEs (dangerous side effects). Each section of the product required simple, but effective data visualization concepts to help users determine if any of the data was indicative of an SAE or if the data was simply an outlier.
User Testing
We conducted 8 weeks of product testing with 15+ clinical trial software experts. We guided our design through user-testing portals, where we shared clickable prototypes. With a testing protocol in hand, we had users perform tasks and gathered feedback. We iterated the interface based on their input, repeating the process until most users found it both easy to use and valuable for their work.
Data Visualization Examples
Often data visualization can be rather drab given the context, but I wanted to share a few pieces of the interface that I was able to create that I was fairly proud of, that users found very helpful, and that the engineering team wasn’t mad at either!
Outcome
I was able to provide the basic design infrastructure for the interface as well as deliver solid user-tested designs that are still being used today. I also got to meet some of the coolest people who do some of the most tedious detective work to discover serious health side effects within drug trials.
The work we did for Lokavant also won Lightmatter a year-long contract with one of their associated companies, of which you can read about the work I did on that here.
My Takeaway
Though we only had 8 weeks to complete the work we did, I’m super proud of my team for the work we were able to accomplish. Having even one solid team member to collaborate with helps so much in accomplishing huge tasks very quickly!