The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is undergoing a massive transformation across all sectors of industry, government, and society called Vision 2030. One aspect of this plan is to modernize and standardize their public healthcare system.
In early 2020, 3M Health Informations Systems won a 5 year contract with Saudi Arabia to implement a medical abstractor, used for standardizing health data collection, into the country for the first time. Prior to this, there was no standardization of health care collection.
After the contract was signed, Saudi officials realized that the software is on premise install — conflicting with other Vision 2030 targets to move to the cloud. Our team was given one year to create a new, web-based product and beging implementation to meet the contractual requirements.
Due to the timing, this project required tight coordination and constant communication with business partners and development. While the data fields to collect where defined, the user workflow, guidance, field criteria, etc. were not yet definied.
Our design objectives became three-fold: 1) understand how the current, legacy software works and opportunities for improvement, 2) identify phases of features for implementation starting with MVP requirements and immediate usability red flags, and 3) design an extensible system which could be localized to other markets.
We conducted research with internal teams to understand the Saudi healthcare system and regulatory environment and medical coders and medical record staff in 5 Saudi hospitals.
Our work allowed decisions to be made quickly - passing research insights to the business owner and development for immediate sprint planning and implementation. This led to:
