ONCOLOGY HUB

Transforming oncology care

Laptop with an image of the oncology hub patient summary screen

My role

Lead designer
Interaction design
Visual design

Team

Product, Engineering, Data Science, Clinical Team, Regulatory, Marketing

Project length

3 years

Problem

Incomplete records often delay oncologists, hindering their understanding and decision-making, leading to wasted time and patient anxiety. How can we empower oncologists to deliver timely, comprehensive cancer care through seamless access to critical patient data?



Solution

From 0 to 1: An AI/ML-enabled and data-integrated web and EMR application that provides oncologists with comprehensive, contextual, and digestible patient data, enabling them to provide informed care for their patients.



Impact

97%

of oncologists said it improved their efficiency when reviewing patient information.

78%

of oncologists said it was better than their current solution for coordinating care

63%

of oncologists used required low or very low levels of mental demand to complete tasks

Process

Lean UX process

Due to the enormity and complexity of the problem, we utilized lean User Experience (Lean UX), a team-based approach to building solutions, and focused on iterative learning, overall user experience, and customer outcomes.

Think

  • Research

  • Ideation

  • Mental models

  • Sketches

  • Storyboards

Make

  • Prototypes

  • Wireframes

  • Value propositions

  • Hypotheses

Check

  • Customer feedback sessions

  • Usability testing

Research

We gathered information about oncologist’s workflows, mental models, and pain points through observational interviews. We understood that having access to all of a patient's data empowers oncologists to make the best decisions by providing them with a comprehensive understanding of the patient's medical history, supporting informed decision-making, enabling the identification of patterns and trends, facilitating risk assessment and stratification, and promoting effective coordination of care. This is all along a patient’s oncology journey, from diagnostic workup to survivorship.

1. Patient information gaps negatively impacts the provider-patient relationship.

It’s difficult to convey information in a patient-friendly manner, leaving providers rushing and multi-tasking during visits because the patient data is:

  • Fragmented in different places and systems

  • Buried in unstructured documents and notes

  • Unparsed for relevance

  • Not equally accessible to all team members

  • Inconsistently documented from provider to provider

Findings

2. Cancer care can be multidisciplinary over a continuum.

  • Teams are spread across locations and specialties

  • There is different levels of patient data access spread across various IT systems

  • It is difficult and time-consuming to get everyone on the same page

3. Longitudinal patient management is challenging.

Oncologists need to know past information to inform future decisions:

  • It is difficult to understand the sequence of events, track progress and trends over time

  • Data from the past can be missing and hard to find.

  • It is difficult to keep track of what is happening in-between visits.

Opportunity

How might we provide oncologists the information they need, at the time they need it?

Design strategy

Provide a comprehensive view of the patient’s relevant information to empower physicians to treat the patient in a timely and holistic way.

Create a solution where data was aggregated, organized, and presented in an intuitive, longitudinal view of the patient’s journey, alongside patient-specific guideline recommendations so that clinicians can quickly grasp the patient’s complete clinical picture, and confidently determine the optimal treatment path and next steps.

Design process

We worked together with clinicians to understand the:

  • Current workflow and support systems

  • Relevant data clinicians want to see and when

  • Type of actionable, meaningful data-driven insights clinicians want to see

We used Figma, Sketch, and Excel as a communication tool to map out clinical decisions and system workflows across multiple oncology disease areas, such as lung and breast cancer. From there, we would do rapid iterations with the clinicians, product managers, and data scientists.

Solution

An intuitive patient view could be accessed and used by all members of the care team, so that everyone sees the whole picture. Decisions are made based on a shared understanding of the patient. That has seemless data integration.

Data Integration

Worked with the data science and engineering teams to integrate to aggregate all relevant data from disparate sources.

Patient Summary

It provides oncologists with a comprehensive overview of patients, enabling quick understanding for initial consultations, easy access to key data at the point of care for informed decision-making, and ensures a consistent experience by organizing information uniformly for every patient.

Patient Journey

In a timeline format, key features include bookmarking important milestones for quick reference and understanding the sequential progression of events and treatment. Users can hover and click to reveal more details about specific events and access full reports. Treatment responses are captured directly within this view at pivotal points, facilitating informed decision-making and comprehensive patient care.

AI-Assisted Data Abstraction

Assistive technology leverages AI/ML and NLP to auto-detect and extract valuable medical concepts from unstructured, free-text reports, saving time and minimizing manual data entry.

Patents & Publications

Oncology workflow for clinical decision support

Publication 20240021280

Systems and methods are provided for managing patient data. The system integrates medical data from multiple sources to a unified patient database. Structured and unstructured medical data is obtained, enriched (e.g., by designating data field types, standardizing data types or terminology, and the like), and stored to the unified patient database. The data retrieved from the disparate sources is stored to data elements in the unified patient database in a network of connected objects including data about tumor masses, treatments, reports, medical history, and diagnoses. The data in the unified patient database is used to display patient data in user-friendly interface views, including a patient journey view that displays patient data in a chronological fashion organized by data types. The different interface views can be traversed to display patient data originating from disparate sources with ease, to improve the clinical decision making process.

2023


Display screen or portion thereof with graphical user interface for selecting a report with an abstraction tool

Patent number: D974390

2021


Display screen or portion thereof with graphical user interface for publishing a report with an abstraction tool

Patent number: D974391

2021


Display screen or portion thereof with graphical user interface for selecting text with an abstraction tool

Patent number: D974393

2021


2023


Display screen or portion thereof with graphical user interface for manually abstracting text with an abstraction tool

Patent number: D974392

2021


Display screen or portion thereof with graphical user interface for modifying a report with an abstraction tool

Patent number: D975120

2021

navify Brand is recognized at Fast Company’s Innovation by Design 2023 Awards, the world’s most impactful design competition.

Fast Company’s Innovation by Design 2023 Awards, honor businesses solving the most crucial problems of today and anticipating the pressing issues of tomorrow. navify was recognized in the “Enduring Impact: 15+ Years in Business” category.