The Story

Mag Mutual is a medical professional liability insurance provider. They serve as a trusted advocate and strategic advisor to thousands of physicians and hospitals. They offer onsite risk assessments (surveys) to their policyholders, who can receive discounts for patient safety compliance. A Risk Manager is assigned to policyholder, who makes onsite visit to survey facility staff and practitioners on various levels of compliance. They advocate for patient safety and provide guidance for policyholders to make improvements, creating a positive outcome for both practioners and patients.

The Ask

The Risk Managers were facing several pain points in their day-to-day, mainly having to do with two legacy systems that housed their survey software and database. One of the systems was completely non-functional and resulted in users having to come up with their own frustrating, time-consuming work-arounds.

A day in the life of the Risk Manager includes scheduling survey visits, traveling onsite to a facility, meeting with each practioner, capturing their findings on a local copy of the survey software on their laptop, manually syncing certain parts of the survey with a database (or cleaning up data after the visit, in the office or at their hotel), and printing a report. If all of the surveys for a facility could not be completed during the appointment time, another visit would be scheduled and the Risk Manager would continue where they left off. Timely completion impacts compliance/non-compliance, which impacts rates, so it is important to know how much time is needed to wrap up an assessment for a facility or practice.

The new survey app would need to:

• Allow Risk Managers to search for, edit, and create new policyholder info and accounts
• Provide a weekly view of current and upcoming appointments
• Provide a summary and status of number of surveys total, the number per location, the number that are ready to sumbit/in progress/not started, and the percentage complete on the survey level
• Allow Risk Managers to submit surveys as they complete them, or submit them in a batch
• Allow for minimal typing, aside from notes and recommendations
• Generate an PDF of the survey report to print or email
• Remove submitted surveys from view

Role, Process, and Who I Worked With

As design lead, I worked alongside my business architect, project manager, technical architect in collaboration with our client. We worked closely with Mag Mutual's CIO, program director, project manager, Risk Managers, and developers. My team proposed building a custom native application for the iPad with Salesforce backend to replace the legacy systems.

• I created low fidelity wireframes to demo, test, and refine user flow according to existing requirements and direct feedback from Risk Managers
• Defined additional user stories and added interactions to the wireframes to act as our prototype for user story sign-off
• Facilitated UI design crowdsourcing challenge using TopCoder, managing specs documentation, design submissions, customer reviews, and revisions
• Created additional UI designs for new screen configurations
• Facilitated design collab and review sessions with project team and client
• Worked with technical architect to develop a specs document and provide design assets for our iOS development crowdsourcing challenge, also using our TopCoder community

The Result

The client was excited to start using this app and enjoying its time-saving benefits. The Risk Managers who were directly involved in the design process were happy that we understood their needs and delivered something so easy to use. I always try to make the design process as painless as possible for those who have never taken the journey of app design from beginning to end, and I think they appreciated it and learned something new.

Once I had moved onto my next assignment, the app went through a period of UAT testing and then approval for the App Store. At last status update, it was slated for rollout and training.

In Retrospect

This was a fun, responsive, engaged client to work with, who made my team's job easier with timely feedback, hospitality, and great conversation. I would have liked to have spent more time with them in facilitating user testing once we had a working prototype. Hearing direct feedback from users in the field would have been a rewarding way to round out this great project.