MyChart by Epic: Viewing & Sharing COVID-19 Information

Role: Lead UX Designer

Team: Developers, Quality Assurance

Timeline: Nov 2020 - Current

Due to an NDA, I can’t show artifacts from our design process or images of the workflow that have not been released by Epic.

The Problem & (Initial) Goals

Before the COVID-19 activity was created, COVID-19 information such as test results and vaccinations would be scattered across several different areas of MyChart. It would also be mixed in with other test results and vaccinations, making it difficult for users to quickly see and share the most recent or relevant information.

As it became clear that the pandemic would not just last a few months, the team began to imagine what a central place for COVID-19 information could look like. The project began with two other designers, who started to work with company leadership and key stakeholders to ideate on the design of the activity. At this time, vaccinations were in the distant future, and the activity was focused on showing test results, allowing patients to do self-assessments, and giving them resources in case they or someone they had close contact with contracted COVID-19.

Process

When I joined the team, we were preparing for vaccinations to be available to the general public in the near future. An interesting challenge in the course of this project was the need to predict the future— what might user needs look like 1 month, 3 months, a year down the line? We worked with internal healthcare professionals who advised us on what information would be critical to show, and what patients would need to know when they looked at the activity. For example, we knew that there would be one to two doses in a series (it wasn’t clear if there would be more at the time), and it should be easy for a patient to see when they needed to go get their second dose.

During this whole project, it was crucial that there was a tight partnership with development and quality assurance. Since we were working on rapid timelines to make sure patients would have the functionality they needed, I had to design with technical feasibility in mind and use standard components as much as possible. Since we couldn’t do everything we wanted to at once, I also created a future vision based on the needs we knew about as well as those we anticipated, to make sure our additions were building towards a unified direction. This has been updated several times over the last year.

The activity had to be designed with a wide range of patients in mind. We did many rounds of usability testing, making sure each release was easy to understand and efficient for a diverse set of participants. Many, many tweaks and changes were made as a result of those findings! We also did patient health literacy evaluations, working with UX writing experts to make sure the language was accessible. Finally, heuristic evaluations allowed us to maintain quality by catching usability and visual issues that needed to be addressed.

Over the course of the pandemic, user needs changed and we had to work to adapt to the new functionality required. For example, soon after we added vaccination information, we started working with VCI and their SMART Health Card framework. This meant we needed to allow users to use any compatible digital wallet, PDF, or paper to share QR codes containing W3C verifiable credentials. There were many other new requirements such as this that affected the structure of the page over time. Since many different developers worked on these additions in parallel, it was important for me as the lead UX designer to keep the big picture in mind and raise a flag if there were any concerns.

As a designer on this fast-moving and high visibility project, I had to execute quickly on high quality designs, iterate rapidly, and meet with many stakeholders and company leadership to help explain our team’s design rationale. I also created high fidelity mockups for customer calls and the media to help communicate about the functionality that our team had built.

Currently, I am working with the team on proposals for a future direction for the functionality to address usability and visual issues that had to be deprioritized during the initial phases of development.

Outcomes