The Challenge
A multi-hospital health system relied on quarterly PDF reports to track surgery room utilization. This created three critical problems:
- Quarterly reports only: decisions made on stale data
- No drill-down capability: couldn't identify specific underperformers
- Physician resistance: fear of unfair evaluation metrics
The Prototype
An interactive prototype organized the way its users already think, with a view for each role:
- Region → Hospital → Unit → Room → Surgeon drill-down
- 5 user roles, each seeing what its own job needs
- Configurable metrics with weighted scoring
- Dispute resolution workflow for contested evaluations
My Role
- Analyzed how the quarterly report was used and what each role was afraid of seeing published about them
- Turned that analysis into an interactive prototype OR managers could react to, and revised it between sessions from stakeholder feedback
- Designed a view for each role, balancing transparency with physicians' concern that performance data is surveillance
- Designed the tiers and the dispute path so physicians would trust the data: tiers instead of a public leaderboard, and a built-in way to contest a metric
Key Design Decisions
- Tier system over rankings: less threatening to physician relationships
- Calendar view integration: context for utilization patterns
- Dispute workflow: built-in path for contesting metrics
- Configurable weights: adaptable to different specialties
Design Methods
Results & Impact
The client's engineer used the prototype to gather requirements from OR managers across the system. Additional features surfaced in those sessions and were carried into the production plan. The tiers and the dispute workflow show the design question underneath: how to keep accountability without a public leaderboard, so physicians trust the data enough to use it.