EmergConnect is a digital platform that allows patients seeking emergency care to register, triage, and get an individualized wait time prediction, right on their phone. I’ve been helping the team to refine and simplify the user experience for these patients, and EmergConnect is now being tested in several hospitals across Ontario. I’m working with a passionate, ambitious team to imagine a better solution for patients in critical circumstances. This project has taught me so much about creating meaningful, impactful work in an industry where it’s needed the most, and it makes me proud to be a designer.
A small selection of screens designed as part of the EmergConnect app. We needed to include prominent progress indicators to give users a sense of how long the flow was. We also ensured each step was separated on its own screen, which gave us enough room to add supporting information for more difficult steps.
Emergency rooms are stressful and unpredictable. While patients are already anxious about what brought them to the ER, that anxiety is exacerbated by a lack of transparency regarding wait times. EmergConnect aims to reduce patient stress by allowing those seeking urgent care to triage and register, before they ever reach the ER. By providing a wait time estimate, patients can understand how long they’ll need to wait, and even skip the waiting room and leave home when it’s their turn for care. The problem we’re solving can be distilled into a question:
How do you move the entire in-person triage and registration process to a patient’s personal device, without creating friction?
The progress indicators were a crucial part of communicating progress through the flow.
I used plain language to communicate different steps in the process clearly and effectively.
Truth & transparency throughout the flow, with frequent links to view in-depth privacy info.
The challenge with this project came with managing the complexity of the triage process and ensuring that users could navigate the flow and enter the required information with minimal friction.
Triage and registration requires a lot of information to be gathered from patients, including contact information, a health card number, and specific details regarding their medical history and reason for visit. To help with this process and prevent users from exiting the flow, it was important to implement accurate progress indicators so users have an understanding of exactly how much information needs to be gathered.
In addition, once users have entered their information, the app displays an estimate of how long they’ll need to wait when they arrive in the emergency room. It was important that this information would be understandable, with clear explanations for different stages of the journey including time elapsed, and what comes next.
The result is an intuitive, user friendly interface that gathers crucial data and sends it to care providers at a hospital, while providing valuable insight to patients who are waiting to receive urgent care. It makes sense of a complex flow, reduces patient anxiety, and gathers the information it requires without fuss.
To help raise awareness for this new approach to emergency care, I’ve also helped to extend the branding to a new website as well as posters to be hung within hospitals. This was a fun exercise in branding and visual design and a great way to extend the branding to new applications.