The Challenge
A healthcare organization focused on precision medicine and risk management saw an opportunity to take on this major challenge with a pharmaceutical dashboard system. By helping pharmacists identify and avoid potential adverse drug interactions before they reached the patient, the dashboard could reduce patient hospital admissions and significantly lower overall healthcare costs.
An initial attempt at building a solution was able to meet some of the desired objectives, but an opportunity was identified to refine the product’s overall experience and UI and create a more powerful and effective tool.
And that’s where Arcweb Technologies stepped in.
Helping protect patients from adverse drug interactions.
Making Pharmacogenetic Information Usable
Designing the pharmaceutical dashboard in a way that was user-friendly and immediately actionable was no easy task. Patient prescription schedules are complex and information-rich, and the company’s pharmacists needed to be able to view a patient’s info in real time, rapidly identify interaction and sequencing issues, and design alternate medication scenarios all without impacting the patient or their treatment.
Because the timing of a dose can be as important as the dose itself, the ideal dashboard would need to provide a holistic view of what medications a patient is taking and when they’re taking them. The system would then need to analyze what drugs were problematic and to what degree while making substitution recommendations based not just on the drug regimen, but also a patient’s medical background. This latter data source would let pharmacists predictively analyze how an individual patient would metabolize the medication in relation to the other medications they were taking.
Lastly, the dashboard needed to give pharmacists the ability to create hypothetical drug delivery schedules that would help reconcile medication regimens. With the system’s drag-and-drop scheduling feature, a user could instantly see what removing, adding, rescheduling or rearranging one or multiple medications would do to the overall patient assessment score—all without requiring the patient to make any immediate changes.
The Results
Once in production, the product exponentially reduced the number of medication error-related hospital visits amongst patients, helped in part by the superior UI designed by the Arcweb team. Medication regimens are more personalized and accurate, costs are down and the company’s pharmacists are better equipped to do their job.
Usability & Accessibility
In virtually any dashboard system usability and accessibility are key objectives. The Arcweb Technologies team designed a solution that focused on these objectives for both the primary users, the pharmacists, and secondary users such as patient advocates.
A universally decipherable set of icons tested for recognizability was also implemented. Where inaccessible orange/light orange/yellow colors were previously used to indicate status and priority, defined color schemes were installed, resolving any potential data misinterpretation when documents are faxed – while simultaneously making the system accessible to users with color blindness.
