NCQA
Healthcare Certification Management App
UX & UI Design, Font-end Coding - 2016
NCQA is the nations leading authority in health care certification programs. Every year health care organizations both big and small, new and old, update their certifications for PCMH, PCCC, and certifications to demonstrate that they are keeping up with the highest standards for healthcare provisions. They needed an easier way to manage all of their customers, internal & external staff, as well as in-the-field evaluators, while allowing these various user types to collectively be able to manage and determine what stage of the process each customer is at in throughout the recognition process.
The Need
NCQA needed to create a platform that would serve as the tool to communicate and document between internal and external users comprised of clients (hospitals, clinicians, etc.), specialized staff, experts in the field, site evaluators, and other administrative roles to collaborate, store, update, and progress towards certification for all patient care medical houses (PCMH). These processes are year round and would often take months to complete. This meant the task we had facing us was to design certain workflows that would allow users to pick up where they left off from last.
What if registration had a multi-variant approach?
By allowing healthcare organizations the option to fill out their application questionnaire's through a series of multi-stepped questions, or to enter their information through "Criteria Cards", which provided a different route for users to complete their applications. This allowed different users based on user-role permissions, but also with limited or scoped knowledge to come in and access cards that had information extracted into objective assets (payment, documents library, clinicians, etc.). This was important because not all user roles would have access to the information required to fill out the questionnaire in whole, but they might be able to updated certain financial or clinical information that would get extracted and fill out the questionnaire where needed. This allowed for the questionnaire to be completed faster since all parties involved could do their part without waiting for someone else to complete their portion. An example of this would be an Auditor being able to review information from all parties as it comes in, instead of waiting to have all of the information at once.
Divide the path to ease users with specific roles to their jobs more efficiently
Limited Responsive Design
A core objective was to allow for the platform to be rendered on a tablet landscape orientation, but no smaller. The information at the time was just being converted over from a paper and highly decentralized process. We had the initial core task of creating the Alpha version of this application, while focusing first on creating the necessary components for all parties (which were mainly desktop users performing their duties at an office not remote). Naturally there were inclinations to do a mobile version and there were really solid use cases for having a mobile version (certain work that could be performed on the go), but it was too early for the organization to make that determination so it was settled at a limited responsive development effort, that would have at a minimum the core building blocks for any future development of smaller view port sizes.
Tablet support for recognition process
The Kickoff
After testing several different options with NCQA's user base, we arrived at a solution that involved multi-tiered questionnaires, multi-stepped progress saving state, that required a highly reusable component based UI design in order to thread all of the dynamic states as effectively as possible.
The Need
NCQA had a few rough ideas of what some of their most important core functionality, vital to their business revenue, would look like in a UI; which we used to start the conversation.
Multi-tiered questionnaires that could scale in an intuitive way
One of the main processes involved in PCMH certification is the application and renewal process, as all healthcare organizations are constantly in one of those two states. This required a UI design that would be minimalist, non-distraction, and have the ability to scale to very large and multi-tiered questionnaires that would be created in a markdown file, parsed and converted to a JSON object that would be rendered into the Knockout templates that would be rendered dynamically and maintain global state so that all users would never lose progress of their application or renewal efforts.
Multi-tiered module questionnaires
The Solution
After testing several different options with NCQA's user base, we arrived at a solution that involved multi-tiered questionnaires, multi-stepped progress while saving state. This required a highly reusable component based UI design in order to thread all of the dynamic states as effectively as possible.
Where multi-tier module questionnaire fit into the larger picture.
The idea of a module could be used to contain other types of data schema, other than simply a questionnaire. For this reason the module was created to be flexible, but ultimately to render multi-tiered structure of some type. Our use of this module was to render JSON objects of questionnaires into a dynamically rendered tree structures. An accurate module questionnaire for "Patient-Centered Access" can be seen below, where there are two sub-sections, and in the first subsection (truncated) the user has the "Same-Day Access" sub-module, which is really just a module generated based on the sections of questions inside the JSON object.
Additional Screenshots
The Conclusion
While NCQA had many people working on different components of their core offerings, we were able to carve out a unified theme for their components that went on to serve as the templates for other internal projects.
