Certified nursing assistants (CNAs) have to look over 6-15 residents per shift. Juggling all these responsibilities can lead to neglect and malpractice in the workplace.
How might we improve communication and workflows in nursing homes to ensure timely care and enhance residence satisfaction?
Project info
Role:
UI/UX Design, Branding
Timeline:
6 months
Prioritized call lights make tracking easy
In many modern nursing homes, CNAs care for multiple residents at once, often missing call lights while assisting others.
Our app notifies assigned CNAs of new call lights and prioritizes them based on order of activation, reducing mental strain and ensuring timely, efficient care.
Help with your call lights, one click away
Some nursing home tasks require multiple CNAs or RN approval, forcing staff to spend valuable time searching for available help.
The Lumen app streamlines this process with a Request Help feature, enabling CNAs to quickly escalate call lights to RNs or colleagues, improving efficiency and patient care.
No resident left ignored
When call lights go unanswered for too long, residents may feel neglected and frustrated.
Lumen automatically notifies other CNAs if a call light remains unanswered for more than 15 minutes, ensuring that if the assigned CNA is unavailable, another team member can step in to provide care.
Easing the learning curve when changing facilities
For CNAs that switch nursing homes often, getting familiar with new resident preferences quickly can be challenging.
Lumen provides a resident profile for each patient at a facility with their health needs. The profile additionally has a notes section where CNAs can leave notes to inform colleagues of patient preferences and other special needs.
Journey map diagram I created based on conversations with CNAs, identifying key pain points and opportunities for intervention.
01
Framing the problem
Talking with CNAs revealed that answering call lights was the most disruptive part of their day, often pulling them out of their regular day-to-day responsibilities.
I focused my solution on this area to improve worker efficiency, with the goal of saving nursing homes money in the long run.
02
Designing and validating
After understanding the problem space, I drafted an initial information architecture and some screens. I then ran them by CNAs, who disproved many of my initial assumptions.
The top image shows the initial hierarchy, which gave CNAs access to all features during a shift. Post conversations, I updated the IA for a more curated experience.
03
Refining the final designs
With the feedback I got, I was able to clean up the information architecture and arrive at a final set of designs for the app solution.
Service touchpoints map, showing the flow of money and services between healthcare providers, patients, and companies.
04
The big picture
The fun creation portion was done; now it was time to be a realist. I took a minute to think about how a solution like Lumen might perform.
This resulted in a map of the potential service touch points Lumen would have with various stakeholders in the nursing home space. The takeaway: while the app is for CNAs, it would not exist in isolation.
05
Challenges of adoption
As a final exercise, I considered how viable a solution like Lumen would be.
I identified several barriers to adoption, and while not perfect, considerations for how they could be addressed.
