Sijilli: A Mobile Health Record for Refugees

Role: UX Designer

Team: UX Designers, Developers, Quality Assurance

Timeline: March 2019


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.

Challenge

How can we design a responsive version of Sijilli, a personal health record for Syrian refugees which can be taken wherever they go?

Background

The Sijilli project was launched as a response to the increasing need of refugees to securely access their health information throughout their migration journey. The American University of Beirut’s Global Health Institute partnered with Epic to create electronic health records that Syrian refugees could take with them wherever they go.

Sijilli (Arabic for "My Record") was initially created primarily for healthcare workers using laptops and tablets. Data collection is often done in temporary field hospitals with little to no internet access, so information is stored locally on devices until they reconnect to the internet. Refugees also would receive flash drives with their health information, protected by a PIN number, so that they could bring it anywhere and share with any other future healthcare providers.

My role was to take the existing UI and make it responsive, so healthcare workers in refugee camps could use their phones to collect data as well.

 Approach

For this project, we used progressive disclosure to make sure the amount of information on the screen wasn’t overwhelming on a mobile device. We also made sure to consider ergonomics— for users on small devices, we had to keep the tap targets easy to hit and the states extremely clear. While we were making the site responsive, we also made some usability improvements based on feedback from various stakeholders.

We completed this project in a one week sprint with a team of designers, developers, quality assurance, and project managers. Our work was presented on several calls with our partner organization, the American University of Beirut.

Outcomes

Sijilli is used today, and as of November 2021, over 10,000 Syrian refugees had a Sijilli record.

Personally, it was very rewarding to work on a project that has made such a big impact in migrant healthcare. Although I wasn’t able to see it in use personally, it was amazing hearing from our partners at AUB regarding its impact and seeing photos from the refugee camps.

Sijilli being used at a refugee camp in Lebanon