Nolea
Overview
A modern (API first) platform to help healthcare HR/compliance teams automate license verification and credentialing processes.
Responsibilities
UX Consultant, Benchmark research, prototyping and UI Design.
Year
2020 - 2021
Location
Remote (London)
About
Nolea is a project I and two of my colleagues have been conceptualising. This idea came from the back end of the experience of working in the health sector and realizing we could potentially automate and solve the credential checking process that seems to be costing the NHS a lot of time, money and failing to meet the required standard.
The Problem
Once a healthcare professional is recruited, the healthcare provider typically verifies and monitors their credentials only once a year. However, healthcare credential statuses can change daily, making it impossible for healthcare providers to manually verify and monitor credentials.
The healthcare industry requires a modern data infrastructure and our team is set on providing a better alternative.
The Team
I am the Lead UX and UI designer working with a single Single Back-end Developer who specialises in Salesforce and API integration and leading the project as our Business Developer.
Process
Once we had mapped out our plan and set our objectives, we needed a concept prototype to showcase to investors and interested parties.
Research
Concept
Prototype
Research
Understand the product, clarify initial assumptions, uncover user pain points, and insights.
Journey Mapping
We started by conducting in-depth interviews with healthcare administrators and mapped out how Clinicians were onboarded with healthcare providers. From these interviews, we quickly realised that we had been looking at the product from the administration end alone but we needed to look at it from the clinicians’ side as well. We needed to look at it as an end to end process that would be efficient and stress-free for both parties.
A New Goal
This led to having in-depth interviews with clinicians on how they go about providing their credentials to health practices. We realised that there was a lot of back and forth between Clinicians and Administrators done either by email or by phone call to clarify and verify credentials. This process caused most of the pain points and became our main focus. We started asking ourselves new questions:
How can we give clinicians the responsibility of keeping the documentation up to date?
How can we have automated checks for clinicians in real-time?
How can we make the checking process for administrators much easier?
Concept
During the early process when the product was an idea, and pretty much based on word of mouth, there was some growing confusion on what we were trying to achieve.
I decided to start conceptualising some high def prototypes and UI screens to help the team better understand the concept.
Early Concept
Whilst the development team were researching the API integration of the product, I started working on a concept interface of the product. Based on the research I had done, I started prioritising what we needed to showcase in the UI and how it would flow between the two types of users we were considering. From the admin user, I initially looked at it from a desktop viewpoint and for the Clinicians, I started from mobile devices. This brought me to a compromise for both interfaces with a tablet view. which could be easily translated to both desktop and mobile with ease.
This early concept also helped the wider team better understand the idea from a visual point of view and became a stem that everyone could branch out from.
Prototype & Design
Now that the initial research phase was complete, I gathered all the information I had collected
over the past weeks and began mocking up some prototypes.
Early Concept
Using the concept as a foundation, I started developing a more functional and accessible interface. With the information gathered from interviews and pain points, we had unravelled, I began prototyping some mid-fidelity prototypes with functional flows for the developers to start testing and experiment with. These included:
A dashboard with prioritised sections divided into statuses
Quick access to onboarding forms
Ability to upload and view documents
List views with document statuses
Ability to track an account
Conclusion
The product is currently in the development phase whilst further research and prototype testing is ongoing.
Reflect
Being involved in a product at such an early stage has been very beneficial. It gives the advantage of laying the groundwork for a producing user-centred product at an early stage where from my experience functionality has always been the priority before the user which caused negative connotations that could not be reprimanded further down the project.
Challenges
Most challenges I came across were in the early research phase. Most of the companies looking into this type of sector are also still in their early phases and they are not so willing to showcase their strategies and what they have accomplished. Research benchmarking for the UI has been straightforward because of affordances however there isn’t much data to back specific functionalities because it is still a very niche market.
Future Planning
I have been developing a UX roadmap for the product which included a more advanced prototype for the product. This will need more resources to produce.
I believe a high fidelity prototype will also be beneficial for the business developer when presenting the product idea to investors and interested parties.