Tracking & Dosing Nuclear Medicine—Cardinal Health
Cardinal Health is a global healthcare services and products company, ranked among the Fortune 20. It supports nearly 90% of U.S. hospitals, more than 60,000 pharmacies, and thousands of healthcare providers with logistics, medical products, pharmaceuticals, and digital tools.
Operating in a highly regulated and high-stakes environment, the company plays a critical behind-the-scenes role in the healthcare ecosystem—ensuring the right medical products are delivered, tracked, and managed at scale.
The challenge.
After nearly three years of unsuccessful efforts to launch Syntrac 3.0—a new version of a system used by nuclear medicine technologists to track and calculate radiopharmaceutical doses—user acceptance remained low.
Syntrac 2.0 was being used in hospitals around the country as a way for nuclear medical technicians to track the logistical history of vials of radioactive materials used for dosing patients prior to imaging. These complex systems needed to represent the regulatory history, calculate radioactivity based on the half life of materials, and aid technologists in adjusting doses by factors like patient age and weight.
Technologists were rejecting the new 3.0 design in beta trials due to concerns about usability. A poorly designed system could impact lives, and this highly regulated area of medicine couldn’t afford such uncertainty.
The Discovery approach.
Our Experience Design team came in to partner with Accenture and Avanade on their next attempt to launch Syntrac 3.0 on a .Net platform. We realized that the offering needed a ground-up redesign based on research with experts in the field.
I led the research and design team as we immersed in the world of Nuclear Medical Technology. This involved traveling to hospitals in multiple cities to perform a series of contextual interviews with technologists, their managers, and hospital IT professionals.
Based on these interviews, I recommended a new approach to the flows and interface elements, and provided a user adoption strategy to help with training and messaging as the new system would be rolled out.
The system.
Based on our research, we knew that the users of the system had a high tolerance for form and data density, and preferred interactions that were keyboard-optimized.
We created an interaction guide with a series of components that made the most of our .Net and Visual Studio out-of-the-box options, but customized in those places that were determined to be the most crucial to efficient user flow and clarity of impact. Highly detailed and annotated wireframes helped the full team understand what to design and build.
The results.
We brought the designed prototype back into the field to test with technologists, managers, and IT specialists. The new system had a much higher level of acceptance during research, and subsequence modifications brought it within the confidence level needed for adoption.
After millions of dollars of investment and years of work on previous iterations, our redesigned version of Syntrac 3.0 successfully launched. Syntrac is offered by Cardinal Health as part of their suite of integrated tools.
As a point of pride, our primary stakeholder at Cardinal Health said it was some of the best UX design work she had ever seen.