Healthcare App Redesign

The problem

Cera Care's app is used by thousands of carers across the UK to monitor the vital signs of elderly patients. During home visits, carers record things like blood pressure, heart rate, temperature and oxygen levels. Over time this builds up a picture of each patient's health, helping clinical teams spot early warning signs and keep people out of hospital for longer.

But the forms used to capture these vital signs had become a problem. Carers were spending so long filling them in that they couldn't properly be present with the people they were visiting.

Recording observations, completing visit notes and logging medication was eating into the time carers actually had with patients. Every minute on a form was a minute not spent caring.

What I did

• Audited the existing carer app flow across iOS and Android
• Ran lightweight prototype testing across redesign directions

Process

We started with a research sprint speaking to carers directly about their day-to-day experience with the app. The feedback was consistent: the forms were too long, too repetitive, and the timing of prompts often interrupted natural moments in a visit.

We looked at which fields were genuinely required versus which had been added as a precaution over time. Working with the health team we were able to significantly reduce the number of required fields without compromising care quality or compliance.

From there I designed a series of prototypes that front-loaded the most critical information, grouped related fields together, and introduced smarter defaults based on previous visits. We tested each iteration with carers in the field.

The main goal we could see for this project was to reduce the amount of time the carer spends on their phone recording vital signs, and give them more time face to face with the patient. Being able to make a brew or have a chat was massively important and one that we should be focusing on.

Testing

Getting validation was hard. We couldn't sit in on care visits, as these were important care routines we didn't want to interrupt. I opted to work from care hubs (the carer's office, essentially). This allowed me to hear anecdotally what was going on, what wasn't working, and whether this was even making a difference.

Outcome

The new forms were quicker and easier to get through. Carers spent less time tapping through screens and more time actually talking to the people they were visiting. That was the whole point. They could sit down, have a cup of tea, ask how someone's doing, and still get all the vital sign data logged without it eating into the visit. The clinical picture stayed accurate, but the experience of filling it in stopped feeling like a chore.

A different outcome to what I'm used to: no revenue was successfully recorded, and we didn't have a metric to point to, but we knew this directly impacted the quality of the care visit.