Cancer Treatment Planning Webapp

Project Facts

  • Duration: 11 months
  • Industry: Medical

Roles & Responsibilities

  • UX Designer
  • Lead Business Analyst

Deliverables

  • Low-fidelity wireframes
  • High-fidelity mockups
  • User testing prototypes

Skills Used

  • Agile UX
  • Requirements Gathering
  • Client Relationships
Inspiration: a map the team used to track their world-wide partner hospitals

Inspiration: a map the team used to track their world-wide partner hospitals

Iteration: version 2 of the original landing page for the public-facing portion of the webapp

Iteration: version 2 of the original landing page for the public-facing portion of the webapp

Deliverable: Final version of the landing page for global users

Deliverable: Final version of the landing page for global users

Problem Statement

The world is facing a shortage of doctors and healthcare professionals. By some estimates, we would need as many as 6.4 million physicians and 30+ million nurses to keep up with global demand. This shortage is no different in the discipline of Cancer treatment and unfortunately, it impacts Low & Middle-Income Countries the most.

The Radiation Treatment Planner (RTP for short) program has a noble mission to improve access to Cancer Treatment Planning to potentially save thousands of lives. The client, a professor with a team of researchers and medical students, developed Machine Learning algorithms that could automate treatment planning; thus cutting the time it takes to produce a treatment plan from about ~2 days to just ~40 mins. However, this futuristic system was hidden behind outdated design patterns and lived in local servers.

This case study summarizes a 14-month effort to create a complex medical webapp from scratch, and make it accessible by radiation therapists all over the world.

In the end, I was able to oversee and support this project through all phases of the SDLC, from ideation all the way through design, development and Go-Live.

  • run bi-weekly discovery sessions for Planning & Estimation with client Product Owner(s) to:

    • identify 9+ Key Features of the to-be product, and scoped the necessary features for a MVP

    • produced rough estimates of LOE for each key feature

    • 4 different Personas & their permissions needed by different user types
      preliminary pricing and billing tiers based on user demographics

    • built an entire Agile Requirements Backlog from scratch for back-end offshore devs (eventually growing to 85+ user stories and 150+ change requests)

    • drafted low-fidelity sketches in Figma for UI/Front-End Developers

    • designed an interactive prototype in Sketch with 50+ screens & interactions

    • iterated through 2 major re-designs due to legal & branding guidelines by building high-fidelity prototypes in Sketch

    • clarified Testing Scripts for offshore QA teams based on User Story Acceptance Criteria

    • ran User Acceptance Testing sessions as product was launched through DEV > QA > Production environments

The application is still in use by the same research team, who estimates that their service could realistically help save hundreds of thousands of lives in the next 5-10 years. Since the project ended, the team has continued to test the web-app with partner hospitals by stress testing it to ensure it can support unexpectedly high numbers of patients simultaneously. Their ultimate mission is still to get FDA approval to expand access to the web-app to more institutions in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.

Project Feedback

  • “I was concerned with the prospect of out-sourcing this project because of the complexity of the process and the importance of the ultimate tool. Luis’s efforts resulted in a system that was successfully launched faster than I expected and has already shown to be highly successful. Thanks to his work, the foundation has been set for an ever-expanding tool which may realistically reach the goal of saving 1 million lives per year.”

    Laurence Court, Ph.D. (Project Sponsor)

  • “Luis demonstrated an high level of enthusiasm for the project and did an outstanding job of keeping things moving forward. He demonstrated a willingness to ask questions and took on new learning with a high degree of commitment. Much of our project involved complex medical terminology and processes. Luis worked hard to understand these issues to improve the process of requirement gathering, documentation, and system design/architecture. His willingness to learn was key in this process as it made him a more integral member of the team.”

    Tim Edwards (Product Owner)

  • “Luis performed above and beyond my expectations. He was able to deliver baseline deliverables in a timely manner and was able to adapt when processes changed and timelines shifted. In addition to his BA responsibilities, Luis also took on tasks such as becoming the UX designer for our project. He designed mockups and walked through user stories with the client to capture the client’s workflows. The client was very happy that there were no surprises towards the end.”

    Johnny Inthaphone (BA Team Lead)

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