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Designing a medical iOS application
MyPL is a medical iOS application that offers a solution to help diagnosing oncology’s cases. This application will mainly be used during specialists regular meetings known as RCP or TBM where doctors discuss and decide treatment for patients.
This project was realized during my internship at L'Atelier Universel.
Before becoming a part of the team. L'Atelier Universel was already done with a part of the process which is user research. The team was able to collect a lot of information by assisting to RCP reunions with specialist doctors.
Doctors and specially oncologists are always overwhelmed with work to do. During a TBM meetings, they try to be brief and efficient.
Medical Interns are asked before meetings to gather all the information about a patient's case. This information
is processed and studied to extract the important events and data about the patient.
This procedure helps the meeting board to understand the case quickly and propose a treatment for the patient.
Seeking again for efficiency, doctors note down the patient report during the meeting. They prefer using paper or a Dictaphone over a keyboard.
Imagery, vocal notes, PDF reports, hospital database. Doctors are forced to use too many applications to assembly one correct information about a patient. They are often lost and stressed to pass by an important information.
Doctors share their patient’s information using storytelling and video projection. They try to catch their colleagues’ intention and get their point of view about the situation. It’s almost like an open police investigation.
One of the project challenges, is the complexity of the information and the understanding of the professional technical words used by the doctors.
I started working on the project in the first clinical workshop, and I tried with the team and our client to define all the words, structure them, and then try to make a template that fits for all the patients.
For the next workshops, we tried to test the template with real oncology cases, correct some of the information and start drafting and zoning the main screens of the MyPL’s application.
MyPL app must resolve the main problems during meetings and help doctors gain time, energy and efficiency. Not only that, but the application should gather and display all the important information from another used apps. Otherwise, doctors will be just overwhelmed with one more application to handle.
The synthetic view is a page where we can read all the headlines about a case. We can say that this page is the patient’s identity. Through it, doctors can understand the patient’s story, his previous treatments, and any important information that can help them decide the next move.
Complicated cases are very frequent in TMB meetings. They require reading between the line and retracing the patient’s history from day one. The timeline comes as an easy solution to help doctors go back in time and find old reports and treatments without looking right and left.
MyPL has to be a database to all sort of information. Imagery, reports or patient’s records, the application has to provide doctors with compatible information when they need it.
One of MyPL’s ambitions is to invest in artificial intelligence. By studying too much cases and treatments, MyPL could be able to read between the lines and highlight the important data.
As an introduction to this field, we found interesting the idea of putting a manual AI where intern doctors can highlight what they find important while filling cases. During the meeting, doctors can also highlight any information on the app, giving them the freedom they had with paper.
After focusing on the patient’s data, we needed to take a step back and define the application scope. To do so, we started listing all the actors and how will they use MyPL application.
Installing MyPL app, defining TMB meetings, participants, synchronize the hospital database…
Edit patient’s cases, prepare a case for the meeting, highlight elements…
Start a meeting, validate the meeting report, edit information during the session…
Transcription of the chairman’s notes, update a patient’s case…
Since MyPL is an iPad app, we had to follow iOS interface guidelines to build all the mockups. All the screens and interactions were reviewed and validated by the development agency.
Our team were asked to design multiple interactive prototypes in order to raise MyPL’s campaign and find investors. This request was very challenging, prototypes have to look as real as possible and the interactions need to be natural for their testers.
Since it was tested by professionals, we had also to work on the scenario of each prototype in order to make it accurate and correct.
Providing such a prototype needs such preciseness in building components. This task made me explore the limit of some tools and raise my prototyping skills.
