Online Physical Therapy Platform
Company
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DrMotiva
Role
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Product Owner
Project
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Online PT, whenever and wherever
Introduction
DrMotiva is an online physical therapy and rehabilitation platform. It aims to enhance clinical productivity and the outcome of physical therapy services.
In this project, it was my responsibility to create an MVP from scratch and manage the execution process. This case study mostly focuses on the UX part of my role. Further information on my experience as a Product Owner will be covered here soon.
Skillset
Understanding the need
Physical therapy is a long and repetitive process that shows its benefits when continuity of the sessions are ensured. Doctors, physiotherapists, and patients should collaborate for a long time until the desired outcome is achieved. When multiple parties have to collaboration for a long time, there is a big chance for things to get complicated. DrMotiva aims to simplify this process, and enhance the effectiveness of services with digital solutions.
To understand the clinical process, pain points on user flows and how we can solve those problems, I have been in the clinic for observation for two months. I interviewed doctors, clinic managers, therapists, and patients.
Patient
Doctor
Therapist
Clinic Coordinator
Pain points on current user flow
Going to the Hospital 15 Times
Patients skip one third of the sessions. Interviews with patients showed us two main reasons: logistical difficulties (transportation to hospital, reaching at time) and lack of motivation to continue to sessions.
If patients can connect to the sessions online, whenever and wherever they are, attendance rate may be increased.
We made a literature review with doctors and therapists and found supportive articles and experiments about the effectiveness of online therapy solutions.
Hardcopy Patient Records
Treatment team (doctors, therapists) should be able to instantly reach the patient treatment status, update it and share it with the team, which is not possible when these files are kept as hardcopy.
Electronic Health Records! (EHR) It is not something new, but we need a specific design for physical therapy process, so that the treatment team can share information with each other and track all occasions regarding the patient.
Finding the Sweet Spot
Finding an available slot on the calendar is an equation with ten unknowns. Clinic management tries to solve this problem on an Excel sheet, hoping that it is up to date.
An algorithm that takes every constraint(available therapists, rooms etc.) and variable(therapy types, duration) into consideration, and suggesting available slot.
Beacuse of the time and budget limits, we kept this solution out of the scope of our MVP.
Blind Process Tracking
Multiple patients get multiple sessions long treatments. Multiple therapists apply physical therapy to multiple patients. No one knows exactly what is going on.
Patients, doctors and therapists will all have their own automatically updated online calendars. Digital clinical reports should be prepared for business and employee performance tracking.
Diving deeper into solutions
Solutions
User Stories
Functional Requirements
Our solution ideas are good starting points for our online physical therapy platform, but they must be detailed further. Thus, the next step I took was to prepare some user stories. The format of these user stories are as follows:
As a (user type), I should be able to (function), so I can (value).
This format is a good fit for agile methodology. By writing particular user stories and modular, individually testable functional requirements for each solution, we can easily create product backlogs and sprints for the development team.
I prepared almost 40 user stories with over 150 functional requirements in total for our Minimum Viable Product. Here are a few examples:
User Story #11
As a therapist,
I should be able to exchange information with the treatment team,
so I can apply the treatment process correctly and efficiently.
FR1: Therapists should be able to view the following information about their patient:
- Medical information provided on examination by the doctor
- Medical documents
- Diagnose (ICD10)
- Diagnose explanation
- Effected body area
- Treatment team
FR2: Therapists should be able to see the treatment team’s comments about patient’s status and files related with each comment.
FR3: Therapists should be able to add a comment about patient’s status and files related with their comment.
FR4: Therapists should be able to control which comments are visible to the patient. Some comments may be critical and should be reachable by only the treatment team, whereas others may motivate the patient and can be visible.
FR5: Therapists should be able to add medical documents about the patient and their treatment.
FR6: Therapists should be able to see doctor’s orders about the treatment.
Therapist Patient Detail Page - Desktop
Mobile
User Story #34
As a clinic coordinator,
I should be able to track clinical and personnel performance reports,
so I can make effective and efficient data driven decisions.
FR1: Clinic coordinators should be able to understand the workload of the clinic by seeing the total number of patients and treatments.
FR2: Clinic coordinators should be able to filter the treatments by status and date.
FR3: Clinic coordinators should be able to see the total number of sessions.
FR4: Clinic coordinators should be able to filter sessions by personnel name, date and status.
FR5: Clinic coordinators should be able to see the number of cancelled sessions and reason for cancellation.
FR6: Clinic coordinators should be able to see the total number of examinations.
FR7: Clinic coordinators should be able to filter examinations by date and doctor name.
Clinic Coordinator Reports Page - Desktop
Mobile
Wrapping up
I prepared almost 100 wireframes (mostly mobile) for 4 different user types. We outsourced a development team for this project. I was in touch with them during the development process to clarify any questions that may arise.
When the product was ready, we made a small user test with 8 patients. They joined 20 online sessions in total.
DrMotiva made an agreement with one of Turkey’s most popular hospitals for a pilot study.
It was worth all the hard work when I saw that therapists and patients use DrMotiva with admiration. What more can a UX designer ask for?
Of course, there is a long road that DrMotiva has to walk. Pilot study will show us what we’re missing, especially on doctors’ and clinic coordinators’ side, and give us the opportunity to enhance DrMotiva with new features.
