Vaccine Management Handled
2 Awards — MDEA Gold Medal, 2014 GOOD DESIGN
Most physicians don’t stock vaccines in their offices today because it’s difficult and expensive to properly store and handle vaccines to meet safety guidelines and ensure quality. This means they can’t help protect their patients and community from vaccine-preventable diseases — at the time that is most convenient — when their patients are in their office.
Vaccines need to have very specific temperature controlled environments. Some types require refrigeration, and other types need to be kept frozen. The client wanted to create a compact solution that could handle different temperature storage needs. There were also HIPAA regulations and security requirements that needed to be met.
TruMed asked DDSTUDIO to help create a design that fit into the flow of the physician’s practices: both in the flow and in the esthetic. They needed a compact form factor that didn’t take up too much space and didn’t require a lot of effort to maintain. It also need to meet relevant regulatory compliance requirements.
Experience Maps – Today and Tomorrow
Applying our design thinking approach, our first step was to create experience maps by gaining an understanding of the environment flows. Aided by expert users and observations, we mapped the numerous existing tasks by physicians, nurses, and other staff, and their flows in the medical office (without AccuVax).
We highlighted tasks that we could eliminate or improve, and created new experience maps to include the AccuVax. These maps helped us optimize task allocation between users and the system, and gauge efficiency gains with the new flows.
Field Research
We built a range of quick hardware and software prototypes to gather feedback, ideas and inspiration from prospective users including nurses and doctors.
Logic Visualized
Informed and inspired by the user feedback, we improved the experience flows, charted their logic and translated the flows into physical and virtual interactions.
We developed the hardware and software in tandem, ensuring that each reinforced the other.
Final Design
TruMed’s AccuVax is a cloud-connected, computerized fully HIPPA-compliant point-of-care vaccine management system that automates many of the tasks with properly storing, rotating, reporting and ordering vaccines. It helps physicians securely, easily and cost-effectively dispense vaccines. The simple function and compact form factor fits easily into the physician’s medical office. Success will put vaccines in more practices, making them conveniently available to more patients, thereby increasing the effectiveness of vaccination programs overall.
We wish TruMed Systems the very best, this was an “everybody wins” program!