March 2011
To see how these concepts played out in our project for this client, please visit Improving Efficiency of Medical Technicians.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." – Albert Einstein
In today's world, we don't need more complexity – we need more simplicity. Apple revolutionized how we obtain and enjoy music with its hugely successful
iPod product line – and the company appears to be poised to do the same thing for photos, web browsing, e-books, video chat, and note-taking with the iPad. The legendary design of the Apple devices combines beauty and simplicity, and uses an intuitive interface to mask the sophisticated operations going on underneath sleek surfaces.
Healthcare Complexity
This month's e-update "Improving Efficiency of Medical Technicians" features a project which may not be as stylish as something from the design wizards at Apple, but is equally effective and popular with users. Our client is in a complex industry, one with many arcane rules, practices, and interrelationships – health care. If you're like me, it's hard to keep straight on all the copays, deductibles, maximum annual out-of-pocket, in-network and out-of-network provider and reimbursement rules, preferred providers, and the like – and that's just the financial aspects of health care, not the care itself!
Our client's medical technicians are tasked not only with performing tests, but also being the "face of the company" to patients. They function very much like "Customer Service Representatives" in other companies. Having to be able to answer frequently requested inquiries and to process various types of payment transactions is expected. Gathering appropriate information for several different types of systems, and accurately entering this information, is tedious and error-prone, and takes time away from the patient.
Designing Intuitive Healthcare Applications
Designing and developing an application which is intuitive for the technicians, yet simplifies collecting information and passing it along – automatically and invisibly – to the required systems, was no small task. So don't let the simple appearance of this project fool you – we worked very hard to make things as simple as possible for our client's personnel. An elegant design masks some very complex processing and operations, as it should.
Todd L. Herman
Read more on the benefits of an application design and development project.
