American Society of Health-System Pharmacists
Hospital Self-Assessment Tool
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For this project, I led the UX/UI refresh of a self assessment tool for hospital pharmacy practices in collaboration with developers at edgimo for the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP). ASHP’s Practice Advancement Initiative (PAI) began in 2010 with a mission to drive pharmacy practice change at a local level. Building on this foundation, the latest initiative PAI 2030 introduces 59 streamlined and updated recommendations that reflect changes in the healthcare environment, projected trends, and provides pharmacists with guidance and direction for advancing health, patient outcomes, and pharmacy practice.
The PAI Self Assessment Tool first developed in 2011 is designed to help hospitals determine how their practice setting aligns with the PAI 2030 Recommendations. The tool identifies areas that could benefit from focus and helps hospitals focus on those areas most likely to have the biggest impact on their practice setting.
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As ASHP moved forward with their newly refreshed PAI 2030 initiative they were in need of a major refresh to their self assessment tool to meet the moment. With a limited budget and timeline for design (50 hours over a month), I relied heavily on UX best practices and some of my previous work to inform the UX of the tool. Working within those constraints, some of the goals and problems we set out to solve included:
Designing a tool that would engage users to complete a long survey in chunks of time or all at once, depending on the user’s preference.
An updated and streamlined login/sign up process.
A modern and updated interface to complement the PAI 2030 initiative branding.
Presenting the user with a useful and realistic action plan, a detailed report, and a clear scoring system.
The Process
To kick off the project I conducted a UX audit of the original self-assessment tool and applied my relevant past user testing, design, and research.
UX Audit
UX issues and needed updates included (but not were not limited to):
Designing a cleaner and more streamlined login/sign up process, following best practices.
Relocating items in the vertical sidebar to create a layout that didn’t require so much scrolling and didn’t leave so much unused white space.
Redesigning the actual survey layout to a more modern and readable format.
Incorporating previous UX insights and form optimization best practices including progress bars and clarity about where a user is in the process at all times.
Past User Testing, Design, and Research
From the beginning, I had the overall UX direction for the PAI Self Assessment Tool relatively mapped out based on two previous projects – a very similar edgimo/ASHP project and a loan application optimization project conducted with Cozy, Inc.
Utilizing my form optimization experience – honed through the loan application project that included many rounds of iterations and user testing – I went with an informed assumption that the designs that tested the best for that project, a long multi-section loan application, would also translate to this long, multi-section survey.
Utilizing my form optimization experience – honed through the loan application project that included many rounds of iterations and user testing – I went with an informed assumption that the designs that tested the best for that project, a long multi-section loan application, would also translate to this long, multi-section survey.
Standardize 4 Safety Interactive Checklist
When I started the PAI Self Assessment Tool, I’d just wrapped up work on a very similar project – the Standardize 4 Safety Interactive Checklist (also in collaboration with edgimo for ASHP). The Standardize 4 Safety tool similarly encouraged better pharmacy practices – in this case in accordance with an FDA partnership. “The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), through its Safe Use Initiative, awarded ASHP a three-year contract to develop and implement national standardized concentrations for intravenous (IV) and oral liquid medications. Standardize 4 Safety is the first national, interprofessional effort to standardize medication concentrations in order to reduce errors and improve transitions of care” (Standardize 4 Safety Guiding Principles).
The screens and bullets below highlight some of the concepts and best practices I incorporated into both self assessment tools:
A large card/grouped question approach was implemented so the user only had to deal with a small group of questions at a time and to reduce scrolling.
A clear indicator of where the user was in the survey and how far they had to go.
User feedback along the way in the form of an animated progress bar after the completion of each question.
The ability to save and exit at all times.
Clear error messages if they tried to advance prematurely.
Transitions screens allowing the user to feel a sense of accomplishment at the completion of a section.
The PAI Self Assessment Tool Redsign
The PAI screens below give a fuller picture of how that tool was improved from both a UX and UI perspective and did come with some of its own unique challenges.
