Project Background

In 2015, the Welsh Government published the Health and Care Standards, which serve as a reference for clinicians to track their performance and ensure the provision of high-quality service.

However, the lack of a modern and efficient system makes it difficult for clinicians to engage in conversations about their performance, resulting in a significant shortage of data.

A previous IXN project aimed to create a system that would address this issue. Although it has enabled clinicians to participate in such conversations, the system still has major limitations and limited functionalities.


Client

Dr Joseph Connor, CarefulAI

Project Goals

The project goals include developing an online platform where every decision affecting its structure or operation is based on user needs and the capabilities of those maintaining it. Clinicians can easily and quickly use the platform to complete self-reports, with questions associated with the relevant standards. User management is intuitive and pain-free, featuring a high level of customization based on user hierarchy. Additionally, results from self-reports are visualized in various ways, such as detailed charts and summary views, to save time and facilitate understanding.

Gathering Requirements

We began the project by researching Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and gathering requirements. After carefully considering the available methods, we opted for semi-structured interviews, as they would provide us with the most information while respecting the interviewees' privacy.

Copies of signed consent forms can be found here.

User Interviews

Clinician interview

Q: How often do you log-in to the current system?​
A: I usually log-in to the system about once a day from my PC.​​​
Q: What does your experience look like?​​
A: After logging in, I go to the self-assessment tab to complete the questionnaire. Whilst I'd like to monitor my progress, I don't usually look at the statistics page as its layout is confusing.​​​
Q: How would you improve it?​​
A: I'd like the statistics page to be more straightforward, I'd like to easily compare my performance over time at a glance, without having to navigate complex filters or menus. ​​

Manager interview

Q: What is the biggest issue you face with the current system?
A: Setting up new users is extremely frustrating; it takes about 10 minutes for each user and I'm never confident it's been done correctly. Ideally, I'd like to import them from an Excel file and send them an invite using their email. Editing their roles is also rather irritating, I'd really like a view where I can easily search for them.​
Q:What other improvements would like to see? ​
A: As a department manager I'd like to track my department's performance effectively. The current system is confusing and unintuitive: graphs for multiple different teams and metrics are overlayed on top of each other, it takes me minutes just to know what I'm looking at! ​I would also like to be able to easily share my team's performance metrics using email, at the moment I'm having to take a screenshot of the graphs.

Personas

clinician Persona

Dr. Miller – Clinician

Dr Miller is a veteran in the NHS with over 30 years of experience in his field. He logs in on the platform on a weekly basis usually at the end of the working week and fills in a simple self-assessment about his compliance against the NHSW Health and care standards which doesn’t take him more than 5 minutes. He doesn’t spend a great amount of time when using the system as he can easily navigate the UI and can easily keep track of his progress looking at the graphs generated from the self-assessments which he uses to pinpoint areas in which he is lacking.

​Dr. Clarke – Manager

Dr. Clarke is a newly appointed manager for the department of Neurology. She can easily manage her teams/department as onboarding or changing users' permission takes her a few minutes. She can easily set a standard for any facet of service quality for her team/department and measure their performance against it. She often shares her team/department’s progress using the built-in share functionality. She usually logs in on the platform twice a week and spend about 10-15 minutes reviewing her teams’/department’s compliance results against the NHSW Health and Care Standards.

manager persona

Use Cases

A use case diagram highlighting the tasks performed by the 5 different user types.

prototype image

Moscow list

Functional Requirements

Must have
  • Clinicians must be able to complete self-assessment forms.
  • Self-assessment forms must support enabler and barriers.
  • Managers must be able to view the team's progress over time against a standard.
  • A user must be able to sign up by themselves.
  • An admin must be able to approve or reject pending user sign-up requests.
  • Self assessment forms must support likert scale based questions.
  • Managers must be able to create and publish customised self-assessment forms.
  • Clinicians must be able to view their progress over time against a standard.
  • An admin should be able to easily design databases and front-ends.
  • Managers could have CTA visual home-page alerts to highlight critical compliance levels within their team.
Should have
  • Self-assessment forms should have an option to specify if the response is taking place during a mentorship session.
  • Managers should be able to view the number of form responses over time.
  • Managers should be able to publish a form to a specific sub-group of users within their team.
  • Users should be able to send a copy of their progress against a standard as a PDF.
  • Upon viewing statistics a user should be able to filter the chart according to the standard.
  • The system should support multiple hospitals.
  • Managers should be able to view responses to enablers and barriers as wordcloud.
  • An admin user should be able to edit the terms & conditions page.
Could have
  • Feedback page for users to report their experience with the system.
  • Users should be able to send a copy of their progress against standards via social media.
  • Rapid "big picture" visualisation dials to showcase average compliance by standard.
Won't have
  • Questions which aren't Liker-scaled or single word barriers/enablers

Non Functional Requirements

Must have
  • The system must not suffer from perfomance issues with high user demand/workload.
  • The system must be easily maintained and extended.
  • The system must be simple and intuitive making it highly usable.
Should have
  • The system should not need above average hardware requirements to function