Medication Recall

In the pharmacy world, Medication Recalls (removing specific product units from supply) happen sporadically, and for a variety of reasons. Often times, distributors and manufacturers issue recalls, requiring pharmacies to identify and remove the affected medications from Omnicell’s medication cabinets. In current workflows, Pharmacy Technicians must manually inspect cabinets to locate and withdraw recalled medication.

Platform:
Touchscreen Tablet

Challenge

In the current legacy system, removing Recalled medications from the cabinet is a fully manual process. Pharmacy Technicians and Nurses must go through multiple points of interactions, making it prone to user error and operational delays. Overall, resulting in an inefficient and error-prone workflow.

Solution

Through the new automated workflow, the cabinet will notify the pharmacy tech when there is a medication in a cabinet that has a Recall. The cabinet will guide the Pharmacy Technician to the door, drawer, and bin location(s) of the affected meds and give them clear directive on which meds to remove and take back to the Central Pharmacy.

87%

Task success rate (up from 54% in legacy flow)

43%

Reduced average task time

Process

Discovery:

Shadowed frontline workers in hospitals in order to document real-time pain points and determine unknowns within the Pharmacy Technician workflow.
Created research guide to conduct monthly user interviews.
Heuristic Audit: Evaluated the existing legacy system’s UI.
Prototype Testing: Iterated quickly using Figma + tablet interactive mockups for testing.

Define:

Synthesis of User Interviews (User Behavior & Pain Points):
- “I have to manually check the lot number for each med and it takes forever.”
- Users rely on paper to cross-check which medications were recalled.
- Pharmacy staff frequently paused mid-task due to interruptions, but the system didn’t allow easy resumption — leading to duplicate work or missed removals.
- Over 6+ taps were required to remove a single recalled item, increasing frustration and cognitive load, especially under time pressure. Persona | Identified User Task & Goals
Persona: