Through this project, team members uncovered five lessons on how to transform a national public health database:
1. Create Buy-in with Stakeholders
Making sure that stakeholders are heard and understood is a critical first step. The team then recommended a human-centered design methodology.
2. Diagnose the Problem
Epidemiologists and public health workers will be familiar with this step: You need to go into the field and understand the issues firsthand. So, the team held workshops, focus groups, testing sessions and engaged in fly-on-the-wall observations. They identified four major obstacles: cost and maintenance; extracting, transforming and loading performance and lag time; nonstandard workflows impacting productivity; and maintaining individual and local privacy.
READ MORE: Reimagine tracking and surveillance of diseases in the cloud.
3. Map the Stakeholders
The team built out user journey maps, user personas, workflow diagrams, stakeholder maps and a service blueprint, which allows stakeholders to visualize the relationships between different service components. Two epidemiologists directly from public health departments joined the team.
4. Start Small and Use the Agile Methodology
The team identified patient search, data entry and nonstandard workflows as entry points for making positive change.
5. Move to the Cloud
Centrally governing the system from the cloud will allow the agency to deploy and standardize database processes to improve the user experience, and any upgrades can be pushed out across the entire system with the click of a mouse.
