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Prescription tracking for clinicians

The Project Brief

 

The client

Lyphe Group is one of the UK’s most popular medical cannabis companies. They have a clinic called Lyphe Clinic, which is the first step for patients looking to access medical cannabis treatment, and a pharmacy Dispensary Green, which dispenses the medication to the patient.

My role

As the sole UX/UI designer at Lyphe Group, I was responsible for designing a web app for their pharmacy Dispensary Green, which would be used by the internal team at Lyphe Clinic, as well as external clinics that had patients who were using Dispensary Green as their pharmacy.

The pharmacy at that point had an internal Admin app where staff could process the prescriptions coming in from Lyphe Clinic as well as the external clinics and a Patient app where patients can pay for and track their medication.

However, there was no online account for clinicians to manage and track their patient’s prescriptions. They had to email their prescriptions to Dispensary Green and had no way to quickly check the status of their patient’s scripts.

 

My Role
UX/UI Designer

The Team
1x Product Lead
1x QA
2x Full Stack Engineers
1 x Front-end Developer

Duration
2 months

Launched
November 2022

The Problem

 

My self and the Product Lead did a survey with patients that are with the Dispensary Green pharmacy, to find out what the most popular pain points were with the service. It was clear that the length of time it took for medication to be delivered was the most pressing issue. This had a direct impact on customer retention, where patients were fed up with waiting on their medication and were therefore moving to other clinics and pharmacies. To get to the root cause of this, we began interviewing the Patient Coordinators and Pharmacy team, in order to get a clearer picture on all the different factors that can contribute to medication taking long to be delivered to patients. Apart from operational issues that we as the product team could not have much of an impact on, such as delays in receiving stock from suppliers and problems with the courier service, we did identify some issues that could be tackled with digital solutions.

  • Clinicians were emailing digital copies of their patient's prescriptions to the pharmacy.
    Which, apart from being a security concern, it would lead to user error where patients prescriptions were being missed. Also, the use of shared Excel documents which were being used to track all the patients whose scripts they received would crash due to size, cause confusion or become inaccurate as it required manual updating.

  • Prescriptions needing a re-write from clinics would get forgotten about.
    If there was an issue with a prescription and a Patient Coordinator had to send the prescription back to the clinic to get it re-written by a Doctor, it would occasionally lead to that prescription being forgotten about resulting in the patient chasing the pharmacy and then the pharmacy chasing the clinic and so forth, causing delays.

  • Duplications of prescriptions.

    As more than one Clinic staff could be processing prescriptions, there were situations where the same prescription was being sent more than once to the pharmacy, meaning clinic staff were unnecessarily working on the same scripts.

  • Clinics chasing the pharmacy constantly for prescription statuses.
    Clinics would keep contacting the Pharmacy to figure out the status of certain prescriptions, taking away time from the coordinators that were processing in order to get back to the clinics.


Research

Once we identified the problems that were contributing to the bad retention rate with patients at Dispensary Green. We wanted to validate whether a clinic app would be the correct solution to cover the issues raised.

We then interviewed the clinicians and clinical admin staff who would be using this product to get their perspective. They expressed similar frustrations, where they were using shared Google sheets to track statuses of prescriptions sent to other pharmacies, resulting in inaccuracies and continuity errors. They expressed a desire to be able to upload a bulk of their prescriptions in one place and then track them as they make their way to the patient, and any issues with prescriptions should be handled in that one area where every clinician has visibility.

We then began listing out the essential requirements for version 1 of the clinic app, based on the priority expressed by all the relevant stakeholders. We sidelined any ‘should have’s’ for later versions.

Key requirements

  • Clinicians must have the ability to upload single and bulk prescriptions

  • Clinicians have to provide patient details so patient accounts can be created by the Dispensary Green admin team without needing to chase for these details

  • Clinicians need user roles, where Prescribers can only see their own patients, Superadmins can see all

  • Clinicians have the ability to search for a patient and see their prescription tracking status

  • The ability to have Independent Prescribers which are not Clinic organisations but individuals that have the license to prescribe independently from a clinic

  • Ability to view re-writes and the reason why they have been requested

Vision statement

The Clinic app will help clinicians process prescriptions more accurately by allowing them to easily and securely send their prescriptions directly to the Dispensary Green platform, track the status of their patient’s prescriptions and be aware of prescriptions that require action with greater efficiency. This will improve Lyphe Group’s customer retention rate, leading to an increased market share.


User flow

As this solution would span across multiple products, before any work on the UI, I mapped out the flows that would be required for a clinic to be able to upload their prescriptions to the Dispensary Green admin app and all the paths it could take depending on different scenarios. Starting with the information that is required to actually create a clinic account in the admin app and the different roles a clinic will require, such as ‘Admin’ and ‘Prescriber’ roles, where different roles will have various levels of access.


Wireframes

Once the skeleton was there and it covered all the essential features, starting with the ability for the pharmacy team to create a clinic account in the Dispensary Green admin app and setting up the clinic users and ending with the clinic user actually uploading the prescriptions and tracking them. I then began designing some low-fidelity screens so I could identify if there were more paths and use cases that needed to be covered. At this stage, I also began looking at how the layout of the UI would look like to cover the different actions.

One of the challenges was that Dispensary Green needed patient details in order to create an account for them and process their prescriptions, however we knew from interviews that Prescribers want to quickly upload digital images of the prescriptions and don’t always have the time to add all the details required. Therefore we added a ‘holding area’ in the Clinic app, where only the prescription images were held and the patient details could be added by another member of the team at a later time, before being sent to Dispensary Green.


User Testing

I then created a prototype to find out if there was any confusion around the uploading of prescriptions. I went back to those clinicians we interviewed earlier to have them test out the flow with the goal of finding out whether the UI is intuitive enough when it comes to uploading bulk prescriptions to Dispensary Green. I wanted to see which parts of the flow caused the most confusion.

During the testing I realised it needed to be made clearer that if you upload the prescriptions in bulk they are not sent to Dispensary Green until the patient details are provided, so I updated the copy and added an information banner to emphasise this part.


Final UI and results

As this was a large project, I had to break it down to manageable deliverables for the developers. The first piece of work would be to allow Admin users to be able to create a Clinic profile and the Clinic user accounts within the Admin app. Once that was deployed, the developers then moved on to working on the Clinic app itself.

Below, you can see the Clinic app version 1 in action, ready for internal and external clinic teams to use for uploading and tracking their prescriptions.

In the first few weeks of launching, the internal Lyphe Clinic team successfully moved over to exclusively using the Clinic app for uploading and managing prescriptions for patients with Dispensary Green. After training, 8 new Independent Prescribers moved over to using the Clinic app and 45% of external clinics that had patients with Dispensary Green started using the Clinic app.

 
 

Later iterations

Prescription upload for mobile

Once the first version of the Clinic app was released, we already had a list of features that we wanted to add into the next one.

During the early interviews, a feature we identified that would increase the number of Doctors moving over to using the app was the ability to upload prescriptions via mobile. The current workflow for Doctors had a lot of steps in order to upload prescriptions, they would take the photos on their mobile and then email or Airdrop them so they could transfer the photos onto their desktop.

We reduced the number of steps for Doctors by adding a quick upload feature into the mobile version of the Clinic app.

Formulary

Another large feature I designed after the Clinic app was released and being used, was the Formulary section.

Doctors were prescribing medication that was out of stock at a supplier level, causing delays in patients getting their prescriptions due to those prescriptions needing a re-write.

With the Formulary section, Doctors could see which medication was out of stock, read Pharmacy team comments and download specifications regarding the medication which helped in finding alternatives for the out-of-stock products.

The addition of this section really boosted the number of Doctors on the platform, as it reduced the number of re-writes they had to do and stopped patients from being prescribed out-of-stock medication, resulting in increased satisfaction for patients.


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