Enriching the physician-patient relationship with the first virtual assistant in an EHR
My Role: Leading a cross-functional design team through visioning, research, prototyping, scoping, development, usability testing, branding, product launch, and executive communications.
To protect intellectual property, I have not included screenshots, descriptions of the workflow, or details about the design and development process.
Give physicians more time for meaningful interactions with their patients, improving their job satisfaction. Simplify how the EHR delivers information and documents the plan of care.
Hundreds of doctors are enjoying the first voice assistant integrated in a desktop EHR. The business case for voice experience in healthcare is being realized.
Caring for patients is built on understanding them. Really getting to know them - the network of factors that impacts their wellness, what they say without vocalizing it - is afforded by time and space for intentional conversation. Based on interviews I’ve conducted and a few academic studies (Kaplan et al, Dugdale et al), valuable conversation with patients leads to better heath outcomes and provides a deep sense of meaning for physicians.
However, there are barriers to those conversations:
These are pervasive issues in healthcare, felt so heavily by so many that they’ve made news beyond the clinical audience (like in The NY Times, Fortune, and The New Yorker). Since technology is a vehicle for documentation requirements, it sometimes gets the blame — too much of it, in my opinion.
So I joined the Virtual Assistant R&D team at Epic to create a way for technology to address these problems. Voice assistance in our mobile apps was well underway, but we hadn’t yet crafted the experience for our most-used platform in- and out-of patient visits: desktop. We set out to make the first voice assistant fully embedded in a desktop EHR.
I led a wonderful cross-functional team through each step of this product's development listed below. I collaborated closely with partners in R&D, product, and clinical leadership throughout the journey.
The Epic Virtual Assistant makes getting up to speed and planning patient care faster and easier for hundreds of doctors from more than 30 major health systems. It's improved users' net experience score by 56%, and physicians have rated these voice workflows above the 90th percentile for usability (SUS score of 82). This product has become an integral part of how the Epic suite can better serve physicians. Read more about it on Epic's site, and check out the following for a sense of the excitement and impact it has generated.
"Now, having access to this technology in Hyperspace will further our ability to gain situational awareness and access to accurate, timely information that helps us treat the patient to the best of our ability in the moment."
"Perhaps the biggest “wow” moment of the day, based on audience reaction, was the demonstration of an “Alexa meets Epic” technology of sorts — voice-recognition software designed to let doctors conduct patient visits without using a keyboard... 'That visit took zero clicks and zero keystrokes,' Gerhart said to audience cheers."
Prior to my work on this product, I had mostly designed within systems established solely on UI. Researching the conversation design space was a welcome new venture. The team and I got to explore how folks learn to trust virtual assistants, and what it meant for a product to have not only a brand and tone, but also a persona.
Crafting a product shoulder-to-shoulder with other vendors put me in unfamiliar territory. I relished a number of new experiences: aligning design principles across businesses, shaping UX patterns that flex to various hardware and software offerings, and scoping an MVP informed by each team's market and user research.
A few times, we were surprised that folks across teams had such different ideas for how a voice interaction should play out. Making more detailed prototypes earlier would have helped us question assumptions and vet with users sooner, smoothing out the road to shared vision. Jumping into details too early can narrow design thinking, but this was a good lesson in timing that jump well.
Usability testing with voice technology was also new to me. Adobe XD had just come out with its voice prototyping, which opened a few doors. We needed to be judicious in our results analysis throughout development, acknowledging what fidelity of experience the technology could truly validate in each test.