An intervention
WYSIWYG: Optimizing the reading of a drug table
The challenge was to improve the readability of a table that showed the list of hospitalized patients and their requests for drugs or interventions.
Main objective
To make it easier for the professional to quickly identify the number of medications requested for each patient and the status of each request.
The devil is in the details
In addition to reorganizing the information, it was necessary to evaluate how to incorporate a new type of request and a new status for all medications.
Not just in case, the importance of relevant information
In the healthcare field, there's a tendency to show all available data. However, this can be counterproductive. It's essential to consider the context, the specific task, and the decisions that the professional must make with that information.
In this case, reading the types and statuses of drugs presented difficulties:
The proposal consisted of separating the information into three levels of reading:
- Total number of drugs requested per patient
- Type of each request
- Individual status of each request
Strategic simplification
The first decision was to remove the statuses of each intervention or request from the header, moving them down to the table level. This allowed us to use the space to show all types of requests together.
Now, the second step
The next step was to facilitate understanding how many requests there were of each type.
The '0's were eliminated and a dash "-" was used where there was no information. A color code and right-alignment of numbers improved the table's readability.
Details on-demand
The detailed status of each medication was relegated to an individual visualization level, accessible only when necessary.
This approach separated the third moment of reading: "Understanding the status of the drug request for patient X" , visible only on demand.
Each type of intervention was presented in an expandable card, showing the detail of each drug and its name.
Iconography was incorporated to quickly distinguish the status of the request.
Against the clock
It was crucial for professionals to identify which drugs had reached the patient (status "resolved") and in what phase the pending requests were.
It might have been logical to leave the resolved status with a completely filled clock. This was problematic, as it would have required the professional to "read" each clock to know its status.
That's why I opted for a checkmark icon to simplify the distinction between pending and completed statuses , avoiding the need to "read" each clock.
The final result