Case study: Epic Redesign
Timeline: 13 months
In 2020, I conducted research amongst medical staff at The Polyclinic’s Dermatology department at Madison Center to discover how to improve the user experience of EPIC, an Electronic Medical Record program.
Participants were as follows: 6 Patient Service Representatives, 5 Medical Assistants, 4 Registered Nurses.
Initial research: Survey
An email survey was sent to the entire department, introducing myself, my intentions, and my goals:
Figure out what causes the most frustration when using Epic
Look for ways the software could be improved to better support its users
“Has Epic’s interface ever resulted in negative care being provided to your patient?”
It was PSRs who answered “YES" to this question, which made sense when thinking about the role PSRs play in a clinical setting: they’re the first point of contact between patient and provider. Epic being vague and confusing would only add more layers between this crucial medical relationship, so I interviewed each PSR 1-on-1 to discover what PSRs felt was wrong with Epic’s user experience, resulting in the user persona below.
Key Research Insights
Current pain-points: Epic doesn’t communicate what it needs from it users very clearly, often leading to confusion and frustration on the user’s part
Making changes to how Epic displays confirmation messages and how it directs what changes needs to be made would give its users less trouble throughout the workday.
Better software = better care: Epic’s users multitask everyday, and would feel more empowered when interacting with patients both in-person and over the phone with changes to existing workflows
Changes to Epic’s information architecture and language consistency can make it more interactive and intuitive
Less work, more intuition: PSRs want Epic to take more of a lead when it comes to filling in information they feel they use daily, but to take a backseat when performing simple tasks like checking a patient in.
The simplicity of Epic and its functions can be greatly improved by removing unnecessary pop-ups and reducing excessive clicks to a minimum.
Design Opportunities
Shadow sessions with PSRs were the best way to determine specific pain-points and the ways it could be improved, some of which were as simple as adding a copy/paste function to improve the human-computer interaction and overall user-experience:
Other workflows required more analysis into what needed to be changed to improve the user experience, like when PSRs were scheduling follow-up appointments as it involved Epic and Microsoft Teams:
