challenge

Our stakeholders want to improve the inmates' health service request process. Current process is mainly manual, paper-based, which is tedious and inefficient. Thus, redesigning this workflow to create a unique, efficient, and seamless request and tracking experience for inmates.

Our Clients:  Correct Care Solutions (CCS), Wayne County Sheriff Department, Wayne CountyHealth Veterans and Community Wellness

Type: Group Project, UX Design & Research

My Role: UX Designer,  UX Researcher

My Responsibilities: Ideation, Sketching, Interviewing, Prototyping

— When I am sick or have a non-emergent medical concern I need to be able to notice a Health Care Professional so that I can receive required treatment in a timely fashion, not suffer and not risk developing more serious problems. I’ve put in 3 requests already and no one cares.

— We are the group responsible, by statute, for the “care and custody” of each inmate and have direct supervision contact more than any other group. Inmates complain to us all the time about needing to see Health Services and we need to know what to do. We are not Doctors and really don’t want anything to do with this.

— In order for me to defend you in any litigation regarding Jail healthcare, I must be able to show that inmates can request and receive health services via a reliable timely system. It helps immensely if I can demonstrate in court that “All you had to do was ask and we have taken care of you.” 

— We have the obligation to provide a process by which all inmate/patients can request health services and receive evaluation in a timely manner. This is a critical component to the quality of our care.

Consulting & Interviews (15 mins)

After getting various perspectives of the clients, we decided to interview as many people as possible from our stakeholders to get thorough details of the major concerns of this project. Finally, we decided to shift our focus mainly on people's management on EHR rather than the specific consent-related issues. 

Building affinity diagram (30 mins)

After deciding to further investigate this problem proposed to us, we first built up the ecosystem map with the help from external health-care experts brought to us by IIA (Innovation in Action) Committee. 

Ideate & Prototype (45 mins)

Applying to the identified user needs, we reconsidered the entire requesting and tracking process, and designed a kiosk via tabula rasa. We broke down the procedure into 3 steps:

STEP 1: Dual-verification identity via fingerprint and inmates' wristband 

STEP 2: Request a health care by selecting categories and symptoms

STEP 3: Track its status of 'pending', 'processing', or 'completed'

User Research (30 mins)

To ensure our final ideas created a better user experience than the current system, we walked through the current workflow for inmates to request and track their healthcare. We inquired representatives of stakeholders and found out common daily activities of inmates.

Base on those facts, we decided to interview as many people as possible from various perspectives, to gain a comprehensive scope of apparent problems in this project. Finally, we decided to shift our focus mainly on safety and literacy issues of inmates rather than the specific consent-related issues. 

our solution

We decided to consolidate a patient’s medical records with their insurance companies, creating a single point of access for consent and data. Thus we developed the Insurance and Medical Request Kiosk (MRK) which allows access to a patient’s centralized medical record at their insurance company wherever the patient may go. This also served as the chance for us to keep developing our idea through University of Michigan’s Innovation in Action design competition.