Business Opportunity: The Northern California region of Kaiser Permanente, the largest of region in the US, wanted to provide improved tools for physicians to schedule patients, review medical histories and document patient visits. In addition to improving the efficiency and accuracy of patient treatment, these applications were also designed to improve to physician's compliance with diagnosis and treatment standards at Kaiser which were costing the company millions in unreimbursed insurance funds.

Process and Solution: Like many projects, my introduction to the Kaiser project involved a wish list of features assembled with little regard to the users for which this application was designed. I proceeded was to conduct a detailed task analysis that involved identifying users, conducting user interviews, and creating detailed use case scenarios. These scenarios would be used to define the user-based requirements that would serve as the foundation to the application.

From this foundation, I defined the information architecture, navigation scheme, schematic layouts, and visual treatments for the application. During every phase of this process, users and physicians where asked for their input via informal reviews and structured usability evaluations.

The design solutions included:

• Appropriate system workflow derived from appropriate use cases
• Navigation model that unifies the tasks into a mental model that user could easily understand
• Easy access to a patient's medical record and simplified approach to recording notes
• Powerful process of adding diagnosis codes required for diagnosis and billing purposes
• Unified application that delivers improved functionality, efficiency and usability

Benefits: The value of this application can be seen with the increased access to a patient's medical history and the improved ability to keep it updated. This combined with new note documentation will translate into improved patient care. Also, the customization features provided have given the physicians the ability customize the way they work, creating increased efficiency and reducing the time spent on tasks not directly connected to the treatment of patients. The easy in which physicians can select and document the diagnosis codes required for appropriate reimbursement, have both physicians and business leaders smiling.

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