Year

September - December, 2014

Type

Team, Academic, Start-up

Role

Graphic Designer, Researcher, Digital Product Prototyper

Tools

Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Flash, ActionScript 3.0

Patient Tab is an online platform that provides users with the most up-to-date status report of their loved ones that are currently in long term medical care. The platform was conceptualized within a foundations of entrepreneurship class, which mandated a start-up idea that would go through two rounds of Dragon's Den fashioned critiques.

The platform will utilize both a web and mobile-based application to efficiently provide notifications such as status updates on patient conditions, visitation hours, room changes, directions and whether gifts are permitted to be brought to patients. Our application would connect to electronic medical records (EMR), which is currently the active system used within hospitals in the United States, in order to display our notifications to avoid doubling the work of information input from hospital personnel.

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The Problem & Our Solution

The current problem for hospitals is that hospital personnel spend extra time conveying minor information to patients' family and friends; time which could be spend on more important tasks. They also find themselves repeating the same information with a lack of central access to patient status information between nurses and doctors, sometimes causing confusion.

For the patients' family and friends, the problem comes from the current methods of retrieving patient status, not being timely enough and lacking in efficiency. There is a lack of urgency with current methods for relaying information, causing stress and concern for loved ones and it is costly to notify extended families globally.

Short-term goals for our startup would be to connect our application to an online platform, giving users these features and updates:

A Unique Code and Password
Visitation Hours

Push Notifications, Text and Email
Nurse Check-in Times

Patient Room Changes
Patient Dietary Changes

Long-term goals for our startup would be to create an infrastructure, connected to electronic medical records, and include:

Surgery Times and Duration

Patient Condition

Vital Updates

Flash Prototype

I created this flash prototype the night before our final presentation using ActionScript.

Since our research and presentation slides were finished and there was a lot of flexibility for presentation material, I decided to make this prototype to present our product with better visual clarity and validity. Making the prototype was completely optional and we were the only team in the class that had an interactive prototype. Some classmates gave positive feedback for the prototype.

Market Analysis

Strengths

Accurate information right at the source.

Good communication skills amongst multiple doctors, nurses and patients and their families.

Weaknesses

Bottleneck processes with entering data.

Double entry of information, such as nurses checking the same patient within the same time frame.

Opportunities

Gain partnerships with other organizations to alleviate inefficiences due to privatization of hospitals.

Change technology infrastructure and eliminate paper.

Threats

Increased work for nurses to input data available for the application.

Competition with other hospitals to make partnerships and provide better care to patients.

Business Model & Financials

Subscription

Charge hospitals for monthly license model.
Charge of training, updates, and service fees.

Sell Premiums

Add premium features on mobile application to sell.

Product Pricing

One-Time Subscription to Customers

$5,000

Monthly Subscription Fee

$29.99

Investments

Bootstrapping

$5,000

July 2015

FFF Round

$75,000

August 2015

Angel Investor

$1,000,000

December 2015

Lesson

My Role

My primary responsibilities were to create presentation slides and demystify the technical requirements for developing our application. In addition, I created the prototype to add clarity to features that might have been ambiguous for our product. I also did some research for our target market, business analysis and presented our survey to classmates in my other class.

Challenges

When building a startup, resources are limited. One of the challenges we had as a team was planning the allocation of financial resources, the backbone of our startup. We received critiques for overinflated financial estimates for our startup during the final presentation, which we changed for our final report.

A minor challenge I had as an individual, was budgeting enough time for creating extra design assets in addition to learning the core material for the class. However, this was not a problem because we were always able to finish our deliverables before any deadlines.

Reflection

In my mind, showing a high fidelity prototype was a risky decision because it may create the assumption that we built a finished product when it was an initial prototype. Since there were only two chances for each team to present their startup plans to the class, I chose to build it to make our group stand out for the final presentation.

If the duration of this project was extended, I would have made a lower fidelity prototype first. Given the short timeframe, I focused on helping our team build the logistics of creating the startup instead because it was the main learning objective for the class.

PATIENT TAB

Entrepeneurship & Application Development