The Challenge

Mackenzie Vaughan Hospital will be Canada’s first smart hospital featuring fully integrated smart technology and medical devices that can exchange data with each other, patients, and medical care providers.

Unlike queuing at the grocery store, the queue in hospital emergency rooms is weighted and constantly changing. Our team was challenged to innovate the current checkin and queueing process in order to minimized waiting time, enhance the patient experience, and increase communication between the hospital and the patient.

We followed the Google Ventures Design Sprint methodology — working collaboratively to research, ideate, prototype, and validate our solution.

Understanding

In order to better understand the patient’s check-in and queuing experience, we have surveyed 52 previous hospital patients. Using the results we were able to create a Customer Journey Map and identify key pain points. The Customer Journey Map was used to identify opportunities and potential gaps that can guide our ideation process.

Using Google Ventures Design Sprint methodology our team conducted a How Might We activity that allowed us to reframe problems as opportunities and focus our ideation process.

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How might we reduce anxiety of waiting to be seen?

How might we make a more personal experience?

How might we make waiting ‘feel’ shorter?

Diverge

Many times, we’re picking the first solution that comes to mind, this might be the best solution, but not always. Now that we understand the challenge and defined the strategy, our team used Crazy 8 in 5 technique to rapidly sketch and generate 8 potential solutions in 5 minutes.

Our team voted to prototype an egg-shaped object that provided patients a countdown of their remaining wait and access to wireless internet. Once we began storyboarding the experience things started to fall apart

Decide

Our storyboard helped us identify three major pitfalls in our current idea. First, someone would have to coordinate the assignment, collection, and sanitation of the eggs. Secondly, if a patient’s wait time suddenly increased they’d likely become frustrated and may complain to hospital staff. Third, burdening patients with carrying an additional object would be unacceptable — some may have injuries or disabilities.

When we returned to the drawing board a couple things were clear. We had to find a solution that wouldn’t disrupt current staff workflow, it had to communicate wait times clearly but without over-promising, and it had to be accessible to all visitors.

User Flow

We began researching the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians’ (CAEP)triage implementation guidelines on levels of emergency to determine how the arrival of patients with critical injuries affects wait times. Then we had to simplify that information to communicate it to patients. As well as differentiate high-risk-high-priority patients from other patients to explain discrepancies in estimated and actual wait times. Once we had a better understanding of this we began mapping our user flow.

Concept Design

The Patient Egg overcomes communication barriers between patients and hospital staff by providing emergency room and urgent care patients with helpful information about their visit without requiring a nurse’s attention. It redirects time-related questions away from hospital staff by offering these answers on the machines. Patients who wish to know their estimated wait time or detailed information regarding their visits are able to receiving real-time information.

The kiosk itself consists of a screen component mounted on top of a metal pole allowing for a strong and durable design.

Validation

With our prototype in hand, we began our guerrilla usability testing. We recruited students studying digital art, biochemistry, biomedical science, and a masters student studying applied health science. This testing helped us identify opportunities to simplify our terminology, add expected interactions to the app, and clarify the concept and purpose of different parts of the interface for the second and final iteration of our product.