Future User Experience

IDEO & Samsung

Create UX strategy for tablets in hospitals

Role

Human Factors Research & Design

Year

2012

Impact

Samsung refined their approach and plan for selling tablet computers

Design Challenge: envision a mobile communications strategy for the U.S. healthcare system.

Result: educated the client about the specific needs and opportunities for better communications systems and developed a long-term strategy to promote new product adoption.

Samsung asked IDEO to create a business strategy to market screen products to U.S. hospitals. Samsung had no presence in medical products, and assumed that a retail-style approach would work. The project required deep education for the client about U.S. healthcare adoption of technology, and how medical staff use information to make team decisions and authorize procedures.

I led the client through fieldwork to ground their understanding of the complexity of healthcare providers, medical education, IT and financial systems, and the requirements of secure communications technologies within regional, teaching, and Veterans’ Administration hospitals. The research team included UI design, business factors, and video production.

Concept tablet UI for hospital patient communication, shown on a tablet device

The research

ResearchKickoff, recruiting and fieldwork, April–May 2012
SynthesisStrategy, opportunity areas and design, May–June
Seoul reviewStrategy and concepts presented to Samsung, June 7
ProductionConcept film shot and edited, June–July

We spoke with physicians, residents, nurses and administrators across every kind of hospital the U.S. system runs on, so Samsung could see how differently each one buys, secures and uses technology.

37research conversations

12hospitals and health systems in California

Where

Academic medical centersUC San Francisco, UC Irvine, Stanford Hospital, Packard Children’s
Closed systemsVeterans’ Administration hospital, Kaiser Permanente

Private hospitals & ambulatory careCedars-Sinai, California Pacific Medical Center, Palo Alto Medical Foundation
County hospitalsSanta Clara County, San Francisco General, Oakland County

What we found

Everywhere we went, clinicians had built workarounds out of paper, pagers and personal phones. We grouped what we saw into three areas where a mobile device could help.

Area	What we saw	What people need
Clinical knowledge	Doctors and students pieced together desktop files, phone notes and handwritten pocket guides, and carried hospital data home on USB drives.	Portable, secure access to information they can annotate and share with their team.
Communication & workflow	Staff answered anonymous pages by hunting for a phone. Messages had no priority, and decisions were not attached to the patient’s record.	Prioritized, secure messages with caller ID, tied to the patient.
Patients at home	People with chronic illness kept their own logs of symptoms and medications, often incomplete, with no way to alert a doctor when things got worse.	Automatic tracking and reminders, and two-way contact that allows early intervention.

Diagram comparing today’s hospital communication chain, where each hand-off from nurse to intern to chief resident to attending physician takes 5 to 15 minutes by pager, phone or computer, with an envisioned network of mobile devices where each hand-off takes 30 seconds — Answering one patient request today can pass through pagers, phones and computers, with each hand-off taking 5 to 15 minutes. On a shared network of mobile devices, the same team can respond in seconds.

A phased strategy for Samsung

Instead of a retail launch, we recommended building the market in two directions: selling personal tools directly to physicians, who adopt quickly and influence their hospitals, and selling enterprise systems to hospital administrators, who need efficiency at scale. The three areas became a sequence, from 2012 to 2015.

Step	Opportunity	Who buys
1Acquire customers	Clinical knowledge exchange: medical education and collaboration tools for professionals.	Individual physicians and medical students, about 1 million people
2Reach into hospitals	Communication and workflow tools that work alongside electronic health records.	Hospital administrators, for about 740,000 hospital physicians and nurses on duty
3Expand into the ecosystem	Remote patient engagement for clinical trials and chronic disease management.	Drug companies and clinical research organizations

The film

The final deliverable was a high-quality, full-motion film used to build director-level support for the Samsung global medical business. Real clinicians described the problems in their own words, and actors played out each opportunity on concept devices. This excerpt shows the communication and workflow story.

An excerpt from the film (1½ min, with sound). An intern sees abnormal lab results, confers with a nurse and orders a biopsy from his phone. The surgeon approves it by voice from the operating room, and the attending physician adds a note.

“Healthcare communication technology lags two decades behind consumer technology. The U.S. healthcare system is in the midst of radical change.” — Dr. Amanda Sammann, UCSF trauma surgeon

Legacy hospital communication devices: old cell phones clipped to a nurse’s waistband, and a pager held in a hand — Physicians and nurses were using pagers and old cell phones within the IT firewall in a hospital. Samsung saw an opportunity to change the communications technology if they could build a secure communications network.