Recall
I was part of Omnicell's Flash initiative, focused on advancing medication management. Flash aims to enhance outcomes for users and health systems by efficiently transferring medications between nursing floors and patients.
Our design objectives included crafting a user-friendly experience that minimizes the necessity for users to directly interact with medication cabinets, while prioritizing the safe and precise handling of medications.
Overview:
Medication recalls happen sporadically due to diverse causes. Often times, distributors and manufacturers issue recalls, requiring pharmacies to identify and remove affected medications from Omnicell’s medication cabinets. Pharmacy technicians must manually inspect cabinets to locate and withdraw recalled medication.
Problem:
In the current solutions, there are no automated workflows at the cabinet to remove recalled medications.
Target Users:
Pharmacy Technicians
Dependencies:
Pharmacists need to generate ad hoc tasks on the Omnicell platform for recalling medications, which should then be dispatched to the cabinet.
The Omnicell platform must oversee and handle the barcodes of all medication National Drug Codes (NDCs).
In the event of a recall, a pharmacy administrator should have the capability to choose all impacted NDCs and input the corresponding lot numbers associated with the recall.
When a recall event occurs, the platform should enable an inventory freeze of all point of care dispense zones with affected NDCs, which will lift after a technician has completed the recall process at that location.
Solution:
Through the new automated workflow, the cabinet will notify the pharmacy tech when there is a med 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.
Design Process
☁️Discovery:
User Interviews
Current Workflow Mapping
📝 Define:
Persona
Tasks + Goals
🎨 Ideation:
Lo-fidelity designs
High Fidelity designs
💻Testing
Usability testing
Discovery
Current Recall Workflow
User Interviews:
We had two formal user interviews and two internal expert interviews utilizing Zoom. All participants were Omnicell customers as well as pharmacy technicians.
Values:
• Clarity, independence, and prioritization
Goals:
Reduce manual back and forth communication
Automate the Recall experience
High Level findings:
Landing page: Recommendation to freeze tech from doing anything else until Recall is addressed.
Medication Page: Not necessary as being able to dive right should be prioritized — there are not tons of value with the existing medication page.
Bin Visualization Page: Not interested in tapping components and not needed because of the cabinet’s LED flashing lights.
Printing Label Page: Still need consideration on whether or not this exists early on in the process or towards the end; consideration for more information to be included such as quantity of items.
Two Step Process: This is more clear and users preferred this as opposed to the one step process.
