Behavioral Healthcare Application

ARGO Data • 2022 - 2023

Role - UI/UX Designer / Researcher / UX Analyst

Behavioral Health Application

This behavioral healthcare application integrates with an EMR system to centralize clinical data and documentation. It delivers high-quality data to support consistent use, even during challenging times, and enables supervisors to track performance across facilities, units, clinicians, doctors, and insurance providers. The application streamlines the daily tasks of UR nurses, reducing documentation errors, preventing missed deadlines, and helping nurses prioritize their tasks more effectively, both daily and weekly.

Problem Statement

There must be a better way…

Behavioral health has been one of the most problematic areas in healthcare for many reasons:

Rising numbers in depressive and anxiety disorders.
Behavioral health facilities are losing revenue due to denials from insurance companies.
Denial rates are high due to a lack of quality documentation prepared in time for reviews.
Nurses rely on EMR systems and paperwork/documentation from multiple parties which easily gets unorganized and often incomplete.
Nurses are overworked and facilities are understaffed due to revenue loss from high denial rates.

Personas

Understanding our users

Who will be using or affected by this application? The different roles play crucial and very important steps early in the discovery phase. There are different value adds for different roles from CEOs, and UR nurses, to Therapists and more.

Empowering UR Nurse Betty: Streamlining Tasks for Better Patient Care and Insurance Approvals

UR Nurse Betty, our “power user.” Nurse Betty’s day is filled with numerous responsibilities, making her workload challenging to manage. From navigating complex events within the facility to balancing patient care, her tasks are demanding. Our primary goal is to streamline and automate Betty’s daily tasks, helping her stay organized and efficient. By doing so, she can focus more on delivering quality care to her patients and ensuring that their stays are approved by insurance companies—ultimately improving outcomes for both patients and the facility.

Gathering Requirements: In-Depth Research on the UR Process

Understanding the Utilization Review Workflow
Key Insights from UR Nurses and CEOs

The Four Stages of the Utilization Review Process

Initial Authorization
Concurrent Review
Peer-to-Peer Review
Final Appeal

Overcoming Challenges with an Unconventional Approach

In the early stages of the project, we faced a significant lack of resources. With no business analyst, project manager, or project owner available, we had to take a creative, unconventional approach. To move forward, we brought in former UR nurses and a Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) to serve as our subject matter experts and makeshift product team. However, since they had little technical experience, this became a recurring challenge throughout the development process. To overcome these hurdles, I gathered as much information as possible, relying on notes, Excel sheets, anecdotal insights, and various research methods. I conducted interviews, facilitated high-level meetings, and organized workshops, using sketches to visualize and refine ideas. This hands-on, resourceful approach allowed us to progress despite the constraints.

Workshops for the win

Working closely with subject matter experts and stakeholders to fully understand complexities along with normalizing and visualizing solutions. In order to come to consensus and propel design decisions the following occurred:

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Weekly meetings with our CEO and COO
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Stakeholder interviews
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Weekly design reviews
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Sketching and whiteboard sessions
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Card sorting
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A/B testing
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Go time = many messy ideas

Throughout the early stages of this project, I was pressed to deliver conceptual designs earlier than I would have liked. Without anybody to write requirements, a lot of the first stage of requirements were based on Figma designs from a few key screens such as the patient census, schedule, and summary which later drove other features.

User Permissions

Establishing permissions

Establishing user roles and permissions is a foundational element of building an application. Now that we understand our users and the value that they receive from this application, it’s time to work through and come up with the rules and permissions of these established roles.

Permissions within the UI

After establishing and mapping all of the permissions for each role it was time to reflect these permissions within the UI. My approach was simple yet effective for developers. Essentially, in Figma, I sectioned off each role and included the screens and actions that are permitted for each role with notes listing out the permissions for each.