Problem: There is a high hospital bounce-back rate among patients in the United States due to a lack of communication between the patient's current and previous physicians. Doctors and physicians have to spend a lot of time to get in touch with a patient's previous physicians because of inadequate means of communication. The process of getting in contact with a patient's physicians is non-systematic and tedious which often requires doctors having to contact multiple different facilities in different states in order to get in touch with a physician. Due to the sensitive nature of medical documents standard email encryption cannot be used to contact physicians and exchange documents so doctors have to resort to inadequate means of communications via fax, telephone conversations etc. Since many doctors today have hundreds of patients, contacting those patients' physicians is a tedious task and causes a lot of waste of time
Solution: Provide an interface for doctors and physicians that allows them to directly communicate with each other while meeting medical privacy security protocols. Use Virtru to provide an API that uses HIPAA compliant emails, and create an interface around it that allows physicians to directly exchange emails and documents. Medical professionals can be verified by using their National Provider Identifier (NPI) and login can be secured by providing security encrypted key cards to the users. All email and communication will be stored on the cloud and access to information will be HIPAA compliant.
There are two personas demonstrated for this software: the user as an initiator of an email and the user as a recipient. On the initiating end the user desires the ability to locate a recipient, compose a message, and insurance of delivery. On the receiving end the user desires an organized interface to view mailbox contents and a fluid format for reading conversations.
User stories are as followed:
As an initiating user, I can send an email to another user.
As an initiating user, I can attach necessary documents to my emails.
As an intiating user, I receive confirmation that my email has be delivered to another user.
As a recipient user, I can receive an email from another user.
As a recipient user, I can view/download attachments on received emails.
As an initiating and recipient user, I can view all my sent and received emails in a organized environment.
As an initiating and recipient user, I can view each conversation in a fluid, single-paged format.
User Story 1: A doctor shall be able to log into the application using their NPI (National Provider Identifier) and password. If the doctor is new user to the application, it is required to prompt the user to create a new password before they will be given access. After access is granted, the doctor will be able to view their mailbox
User Story 2: A doctor shall be able to view all emails that they have received or sent to other doctors. The doctor shall be able to click on one of the two mailboxes to view the content of the selected box. Inside each mailbox the doctor shall be able to click on an individual email to expand it for viewing.
User Story 3: A doctor shall be able to upload patient documents or material to the application and share it with other doctors. It is required that the sender to input the receivers NPI to be able to share the patient documents, otherwise; the documents can only be viewed by the sender.