Ada Editorial • ada.com
Getting medics back to hospital faster with smooth COVID-19 tests
Pandemic partners: how Labor Berlin and Ada gave 5,000 people a better COVID-19 testing experience
“Product Design Director • Ada Health • 2020”
My role in brief
- Liaised with Labor Berlin stakeholders for requirements gathering, ongoing alignment, and product delivery
- Provided guidance and oversight for the product team, particularly for the two designers involved
- Supported the definition of the experience strategy
- Reviewed work throughout to ensure high standard for quality and safety
The 2020 global pandemic has had unparalleled impact on people, public institutions, businesses, and countries as a whole. Like many other companies operating in the digital health tech space, Ada rose to the challenge and has been making every effort possible to support health organisations in the ongoing fight against COVID-19.
Collaboration has always been fundamental to Ada's approach, even more so in this critical time of constantly evolving needs. We have been working closely with a number of partners to help them support people in their care. One of them, Labor Berlin, a lab processing diagnostic tests, was facing a sudden spike in demand and approached Ada for help.
Supporting team and partners
As the representative for product experience, I liaised with Labor Berlin stakeholders for requirements gathering, ongoing alignment, and product delivery.
After initial consultation with Labor to understand context, intended use, and technical baseline, a team of two designers, three engineers, and a product manager joined up to explore ways to improve Labor Berlin’s mainly paper-based process with digital alternatives.
Through ideation sessions and regular reviews I helped the team identify the problem areas, define and validate opportunities, and deliver a fit-for-purpose solution in keeping with our high standards for quality and safety.
A system failing under pressure
What we learned was that
The existing process was heavily paper-based
Data capture happened manually and in-person, making appointments unnecessarily long
Results were shared manually via in-person consultation, phone, and/or post, creating a bottleneck and causing a backlog of results
The process overall was unclear to most people in need of testing
One of the main challenges was to find ways to integrate solutions on our site with Labor's existing technology stack. With two separate systems passing information forth and back, data privacy and information security were paramount.
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Simplified service blueprint, highlighting areas of focus
Finding efficiencies through digitisation
We started by mapping what we considered the ideal journey for someone in need of a test. In a blueprint for the redesigned service we broke the experience down into
distinct stages; i.e. awareness, pre-screening, registration, booking, testing, advice
key steps for each stage
service layers involved at each step, i.e. actors and systems
Based on the blueprint the group discussed technical feasibility, effort, and priority. We decided that pre-screening based on an integration with Ada's COVID-19 Screener and an option to book appointments online were out of scope at this point.
Our focus for a fit-for-purpose solution was efficiency in registration and access to results, as well as offering tailored care advice based on test results. All while being as transparent and helpful as possible at every step of the way.
Balancing speed to market and product safety
While making every effort to move quickly, we continuously engaged with our Experience Research, Medical Safety and Regulatory Affairs teams, as well as subject matter experts at Labor Berlin, to ensure compliance with our high standards for usability, information security and medical safety.
Within three weeks we had a system in place which
removed paper forms,
significantly cut time visitors spent with a nurse,
allowed results to be accessed digitally as soon as they were ready,
tailored advice on next steps to the outcome of the test.
Monitoring closely as test processing began, we further improved parts of the experience throughout the following weeks, rigorously tracking observations, decisions, changes and subsequent releases in a Design History File.