Clinical Trial Management System
The Pancreatic Cancer Action Network’s Clinical Trials Management System (CTMS) is a case management tool used to facilitate call center workflows. CTMS allows call center associates to manage a constituent and clinical trial database and to produce reports used to provide insight into organizational efficacy.
Role
I led a team comprised of a user researcher, UX designer and developer and also functioned as a product designer on the project.
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CTMS was a legacy system in need of enhancement. Because the system was so defunct, call center associates created workarounds to support their daily tasks, in turn limiting manager visibility into workload, increasing learning curves for new users, and ultimately creating unsustainable practices for associates themselves. We conducted research to gauge the highest impact areas of the tool for redesign and to create a roadmap of enhancements to the platform.
Managing Task Lists
The Work Queue feature on the Associate Dashboard is a task list for associates to manage upcoming follow ups and requests for clinical trial information. Associates found the task list difficult to manage, as reminders didn’t include key context to inform priority, editing reminders required multiple steps and the list was not easily scanned. Because of its unwieldy workflow, associates neglected to update their Work Queue list.
BEFORE: The key use case for associates accessing their dashboard was not abundantly clear on load, as search was given primary placement.
And sort order, featured content and styling also impacted the associates ability to quickly peruse their work queue to understand priority.
ENABLING DECISION-MAKING
It quickly became clear, as stakeholders expressed the importance of the Work Queue, that the feature was not given pride of place. Equally weighted with a sporadically-used search feature, Work Queue did not appear to be the most important aspect of the associates' CTMS experience.
The list also did not feature content that enabled associates to decide what their next task should be — content like due dates, reminder notes and follow up details did not exist, and attempt number and type were hidden behind a click. Each associate also used certain data inputs in different ways, leading to confusion about the actual state of a constituent follow up. We addressed these issues by populating additional content to the Work Queue table and standardizing the collection and meaning of the data.
BEFORE: Attempt number and type information were not helpful to associates because no one used attempt number in the same way.
AFTER: Revisions to the input helped to communicate the desired workflow of designating attempts.
REMOVING BARRIERS TO WORKFLOW
One of the other big complaints about the Work Queue was that actions were not easily taken from the Work Queue itself. Editing reminders required associates had to move through a five-step process to do so, navigating first to the constituent’s profile where associated reminders lived. And even navigating to the constituent’s profile required multiple clicks as well. Our enhancements gave users access to each of these frequently repeated actions in a single click, reducing the time it took for users to manage their work queue, and thus increasing the likelihood that the associate’s tasks would stay up-to-date.
AFTER: Layout, content and features were enhanced to better communicate the priority of work queue reminders,
give users immediate access to common actions and more context for how to prioritize reminders.
Logging Constituent Interactions
Another pain point for associates was an existing workflow to log constituent interactions. The organization’s piecemeal approach to adding fields based on new initiatives resulted in a cumbersome form. It included a slew of inputs with no clear hierarchy, different information was required to be captured depending on the number of times the constituent had been interacted with, and associates were required to log certain details in multiple systems. Also because of the drastically varying nature of interactions, key information was being entered into a large open notes field rather than in a trackable location.
PROTOTYPING & Testing
Our UX designer began by designing a high-fidelity functional prototype in Axure to build out a cascading logic of conditional questions based on 1) where the constituent was in the call center lifecycle and 2) what topics the constituent and associate had discussed. We also reordered the content on the page and collapsed less frequently used sections in order to communicate the most important information to capture.
We then conducted usability tests and a survey with associates to test the proposed solution, gathering both qualitative and quantitative feedback on the success of the solution. With a few tweaks to nomenclature, layout and the addition of some requested features, the solution was ready for development.
The revised call log workflow includes a conditional line of questioning that only displays inputs related to topics discussed.
Measuring Success
Through client feedback, we were able to understand our impact in both qualitative and quantitative ways. In the 3 months post-launch, Patient Central managers observed the following improvements:
Reduction in time spent entering interaction details
More timely logging of interactions
Reduction in time spent reviewing Interaction History
Reduction in training time for new associates
Better adherence to protocol
Patient Central managers reported a 60% decrease in the number of tracking mistakes due to the enhancements to interaction logging.
CTMS Takeaways
The limitations created by the way the original system was designed on the back-end made each of our solutions that much more complicated, but working with our developer to find the sweet spot of what we could support was such a good experience.
It was a challenge designing within a system with an established, albeit retro UI style. We were able to make some pretty significant improvements to the usability of the tool through better emphasized button styles and more white space, while still staying close enough to the original styles so as not to be jarring.