Tech-enabled service to transform waiting room care management in the Emergency Department
August 2021 to December 2022 - Duke University
For my Master’s in Biomedical Engineering, Medical Device Design Certificate, I participated in the Design Health Fellowship. The Design Health Fellowship is a patient-centered program that discovers the pressing needs in healthcare, and assembles teams across engineering, business, and medicine, to tackle challenging problems in the healthcare industry. Through a three-semester partnership with Duke School of Medicine, my team and I collected and interpreted data and health insights in the clinical environment and used structured ethnography tools to identify unmet, underserved, and unarticulated needs. We gathered the voice of clinicians and patients in the hospital’s Emergency Department (ED) through qualitative research and insight-informed innovation to conduct needs-finding and iteratively prototype a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. We developed a modern, service-driven business model and established Go to Market strategies with the objective of reducing overcrowding in the ED, improving patient care, and empowering providers with key information about patients who are in the waiting room. During our project our team has received positive feedback from clinicians on the interface and, through a simulated test of the functional wireframe, we were able to gauge its efficacy. It has been rewarding to see our solution’s potential impact on patient care, physician workflow, and waiting room throughput.
We are currently awaiting IRB approval to conduct testing of our software on ED patients. Given this constraint, we constructed simulated patients representative of ED waiting room patients for providers to review on our software. This early testing showed promising results, indicating REVAL has the potential to reduce the average wait time to disposition from 2 hours and 20 minutes to just 45 minutes. The use case also indicated a 73% reduction in patients leaving before being seen. While promising, these findings will need to be further tested in real time in the ED with both patients and physicians.
