For 6 weeks, I worked closely with Guardant Health to design an intuitive platform, SiteConnect, to help oncologists leverage GuardantHealth's comprehensive gene report to find eligible cancer patients for clinical trials.
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This initial MVP concept leveraged GuardantHealth's Guardant360 report to automatically flag patients who were eligible for existing trials. Our goal was to create an interface that would allow the trial team to easily identify eligible patients based on their genes or traits through an automated system.
SiteConnect should automatically notify the right personnel at key points during the patient search. In order to find the right patients for a trial, the trial team needs to be able to easily communicate what they're looking for in a patient. Oncologists also need to be made known of new trials that their patients might want to participate in.
Currently, the tools that trial teams have at their disposal for sharing the details of a study are clinicaltrials.gov, marked PDFs, and updating their team through word of mouth. There was a need for teams to be able to reference or review a trial study through more capable means.
We kicked this project off by interviewing a few doctors and clinical trial staff that were invested in the success of SiteConnect. As a result of our interviews, we were able to identify the 3 key user roles we were designing for:
The PI is a researcher who leads a clinical trial study, usually for the purpose of pharmaceutical research or discovering breakthroughs in medicine. She works closely with a trial team to define patient eligibility criteria.
SiteConnect should help a PI by:
The trial nurse is responsible for the recruitment of patients and may be managing several trials at a time. He is on the PI's trial team, and is in constant communication with the PI about patient enrollment and eligibility.
SiteConnect should help a trial nurse by:
A treating oncologist is the doctor of a cancer patient who might be eligible for clinical trials. He is the one who initially ordered a Guardant360 report for the patient, which identifies genes that can be targeted in a patient search. He is the buffer between a trial team and a patient, and only acts in the best interest of the patient. The oncologist is extremely sensitive to how his patient receives information.
SiteConnect helps a treating oncologist by:
In this initial learning phase, we explored SiteConnect's possibilities by asking questions about what may be needed (or not needed) in an ideal patient search experience. Using our personas as a compass, we explored areas that we felt could immediately impact our users' current workflow, such as communication, search creation, and trial management.
During this process, we got a lot of things wrong, but that helped us narrow down our list of priorities and focus in on what we needed in an MVP version of SiteConnect.
As we learned more about clinical trials and how they are currently conducted, we created a broad experience map and journey maps outlining the ideal experience we wanted to create for our users. These helped guide the way we thought about features and core functions in SiteConnect.
Collaboration: There was a huge need for better ways for teams to stay informed on a clinical trial. We found that communication between PIs, trial nurses, and treating oncologists were mostly happening on the fly. Nurses would take notes in the moment or rely on memory to relay that information to their team.
Management: Current forms of trial management were also quite dated. Aside from the trial record that is required to be submitted to clinicaltrials.gov, there was no formal method of keeping track of patient requirements and trial information across a trial team.
Transparency: In order for trial teams to effectively select patients who are right for the trial, they needed to know as much as they could about the patient. We needed to find ways to allow trial teams to get what they needed from a patient's oncologist at the right time, all while remaining HIPAA compliant.
We moved into the wireframing stage with more clarity of the workflows we wanted to establish for our users. We identified and iterated across several key areas of SiteConnect:
Dashboard: The dashboard consisted of a kanban view of each phase of the patient search: New Match, In Screening, Qualified, Consented, Enrolled, and Declined. Patients would be automatically moved across the board as they get matched and determined as eligible / ineligible. It also served as a space for trial teams and the oncologist to communicate about a matched patient to determine final eligibility.
Notifications: Our users aren't on SiteConnect all the time, watching for patients to get matched. This is only one step within the greater flow of conducting a trial, and it's important that the right people respond at the right time when a match is made. Users needed to be able to define how they wanted to be notified outside of SiteConnect and for which events.
Manage Clinical Trials: From time to time, details of a clinical trial study may change. When this happens, SiteConnect provides a space for trial teams to stay informed and on the same page. To make it easy for trial teams to manage trials, they'll be able to import information from clinicaltrials.gov, then refine and update the trial details as time goes on so the whole team stays informed.
Creating a Patient Search (Rule Builder): We learned that it's quite common for trial teams to initially search for different groups of patients for a clinical trial. This is so that they can determine the best "group" to study and move forward with. For SiteConnect, we created a rule builder that allowed a trial nurse to target Guardant 360 information, as well as a freeform list so they can capture custom eligibility criteria, such as age, location, and other demographics.
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