Project Goal
"Designing a Seamless Blood Management System: A Case Study in Healthcare Innovation"
Year
2021
My Role:
UI/UX Designer
This was a truly exciting project to work on, and the duration of the project from initiation to final review and handoff was around 4 to 5 weeks. It may help to mention that I have believed in LifeBank since the earliest days and have worked with the team in the past, so I have a pretty good understanding of all the company stands for and why it needs the solutions it builds.
LifeBank is a medical distribution company that uses data, technology, and smart logistics to improve the discoverability, delivery, affordability, and safety of essential medical products such as blood and oxygen to hospitals in Nigeria and Kenya. They mobilize blood donations, take inventory of all blood available in the country, and deliver blood in the right condition to the point of need by connecting hospitals with the best blood banks across the region.
For this project, the LifeBank team wanted to build a consolidated platform that housed five interconnected portals and served as a single entry point for the respective user account types. They set out to build a central Blood Management System to achieve this, and I was more than happy to take on this challenge.
The Blood Management System is to be engineered as a set of surveillance procedures covering the entire transfusion chain, from the donation and processing of blood and its components to their provision and transfusion to patients and their follow-up. This includes monitoring, reporting, investigating, and analysing adverse events related to the donation, processing, and transfusion of blood and taking actions to prevent their occurrence or recurrence.
The project was carried out by a team of two: myself (as lead) and Godwin (a Product Design trainee/mentee). I started working with Godwin the month this project came in, and it was a teachable experience for me as well because, while I have experience dealing with projects like this independently, I had never really led a team of my own outside companies I had been employed with.
I was excited to see Godwin contribute greatly to the execution of this project, even though he had just begun his product design journey. I can confidently say that he'll be a great asset to the design community.
Okay, enough about us!
The problem at hand was not just one of usability but had deep roots at a functional level. Additionally, signing in across multiple platforms just to complete simple tasks can be daunting to any user.
The users of the Lifebank platforms will be consolidated as the BMS, comprised of Admins, Blood Banks, Screeners, Hospitals, and screeners, each having to shuffle between one or two standalone platforms to fulfill their required tasks.
The original standalone platforms consist of;