Radiation Treatment Planner
Deliverables
Low-fidelity wireframes
High-fidelity mockups
User testing prototypes
Roles & Responsibilities
UX Designer
Lead Business Analyst
Project Facts
Duration: 11 months
Industry: Healthcare
Skills Used
Agile UX
Requirements Gathering
Client Relationships
Using AI to expand access to healthcare expertise
IT ALL STARTED WITH A VISION...and not much else.
On Day 1, all I got was a word document with the client’s mission:
“From: Project Sponsor
To: Luis
Preparing a radiation therapy treatment plan involves two time-consuming tasks:1.) the segmentation of targets and normal tissues on a CT image, and2.) the optimization of the treatment beams. Our goal is to automate these 2 tasks and to offer it as a service, primarily for Low- and Middle-Income countries.”
The client, a professor with a team of researchers and medical students, developed Machine Learning algorithms that could automate treatment planning; thus cutting the time it takes to produce a treatment plan from about ~2 days to just ~40 mins. However, this futuristic system was hidden behind outdated design patterns and lived in local servers. This case study summarizes a 14-month effort to create a complex medical webapp from scratch, and make it accessible by radiation therapists all over the world.
Problem Statement
Healthcare Provider Shortage
The world is facing a shortage of doctors and healthcare professionals. By some estimates, we would need as many as 6.4 million physicians and 30+ million nurses to keep up with global demand. This shortage is no different in the discipline of Cancer treatment and unfortunately, it impacts Low & Middle-Income Countries the most.
The Radiation Treatment Planner (RTP for short) program has a noble mission to improve access to Cancer Treatment Planning to potentially save thousands of lives.
The client’s team consisted researchers developing in-house algorithms that could help automate how Cancer treatments are generated. Their system was futuristic in that it used deep learning to automate complex clinical processes. But it was hidden behind old-school design patterns and built on unacessible platforms.
The definition of success going forward would include:
expanding access to their back-end systems from their Hospital Research via a webapp
encrypting Protected Health Information before storing & sharing it between external institutions
designing a seamless experience while expecting errors in file transfers and algorithmic calculations
exploring how to verify legitimate institutions, and then decide how to charge customers on an ability-to-pay basis (different
rates for developed countries vs LMICs (Low- to Middle-Income Countries)
Outcomes & Results
From Scratch, to Go-Live
In the end, I was able to oversee and support this project through all phases of the SDLC, from ideation all the way through design, development and Go-Live. Here are a few highlights of design iterations that we worked through.
Inspiration: a map the team used to track their world-wide partner hospitals
Iteration: version 2 of the original landing page for the public-facing portion of the webapp
Deliverable: Final version of the landing page for global users
By self-teaching myself design on this project, I performed all the core functions of both a Lead Business Analyst, and a UX Designer. Including specifically, I was able to run bi-weekly Requirements Gathering and Design Review sessions with client Product Owners to:
identify 9+ Key Features of the to-be product, and scoped the necessary features for a MVP
produce rough estimates of LOE for each key feature
4 different Personas & their permissions needed by different user types
preliminary pricing and billing tiers based on user demographics
built an entire Agile Requirements Backlog from scratch for back-end offshore devs (eventually growing to 85+ user stories and 150+ change requests)
drafted low-fidelity sketches in Figma for UI/Front-End Developers
designed an interactive prototype in Sketch with 50+ screens & interactions
iterated through 2 major re-designs due to legal & branding guidelines by building high-fidelity prototypes in Sketch
clarified Testing Scripts for offshore QA teams based on User Story Acceptance Criteria
ran User Acceptance Testing sessions as product was launched through DEV > QA > Production environments
The application is still in use by the same research team, who estimates that their service could realistically help save hundreds of thousands of lives in the next 5-10 years. Since the project ended, the team has continued to test the web-app with partner hospitals by stress testing it to ensure it can support unexpectedly high numbers of patients simultaneously. Their ultimate mission is still to get FDA approval to expand access to the web-app to more institutions in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.
Project Feedback
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“I was concerned with the prospect of out-sourcing this project because of the complexity of the process and the importance of the ultimate tool. Luis’s efforts resulted in a system that was successfully launched faster than I expected and has already shown to be highly successful. Thanks to his work, the foundation has been set for an ever-expanding tool which may realistically reach the goal of saving 1 million lives per year.”
Laurence Court, Ph.D. (Project Sponsor)
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“Luis demonstrated an high level of enthusiasm for the project and did an outstanding job of keeping things moving forward. He demonstrated a willingness to ask questions and took on new learning with a high degree of commitment. Much of our project involved complex medical terminology and processes. Luis worked hard to understand these issues to improve the process of requirement gathering, documentation, and system design/architecture. His willingness to learn was key in this process as it made him a more integral member of the team.”
Tim Edwards (Product Owner)
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“Luis performed above and beyond my expectations. He was able to deliver baseline deliverables in a timely manner and was able to adapt when processes changed and timelines shifted. In addition to his BA responsibilities, Luis also took on tasks such as becoming the UX designer for our project. He designed mockups and walked through user stories with the client to capture the client’s workflows. The client was very happy that there were no surprises towards the end.”
Johnny Inthaphone (BA Team Lead)
