On Call - Collaborative Healthcare Staffing

Julia Jong

On Call is a project management tool for hiring healthcare flex workers more efficiently.

Hospitals and IT service agencies often hire flex workers — who can be contracted on a flexible schedule to fill temporary roles on short notice.

Challenges

Healthcare IT Agencies need to hire 20 to 2000 flex workers in a few weeks.
Hospitals need to find flex workers to cover staffing shortages on short notice.

Solution

On Call is a web app that helps hospitals and IT agencies hire faster by giving them a direct line of communication with trusted, in-network flex workers.

Process

Our team's goal was to validate and prototype a flex worker hiring platform that could serve both IT Agency and Hospital clients.

Role

Research Synthesis | Personas | User Journeys | User Flows | Wireframing

Impact

✅ We validated a hospital use case for the product via user research
✅ We influenced the MVP design to scale for potential hospital clients

User Research

On Call's product was designed for IT Agency needs. We needed to validate if the product concept could be applied for hospital hiring.
We conducted 7 user interviews with:
2 nurses
4 unit managers, and
1 staffing administrator

Insights

We learned the hospital staffing process has many different stakeholders and types of workers who have to communicate rapidly.
We translated the IT Agency user flow, designed for a solo Project Manager, into a user flow suited to the more complex hospital staffing process.

Design

We prototyped the workflow of how hospital stakeholders would collaborate to fill open shifts.
We were able to simplify how stakeholders could assign available flex workers to open shifts directly from their main dashboard.

User Testing

We tested the prototype with 1 Unit Manager and 1 Staffing Administrator to see if the workflow would support a multi-stakeholder staffing process.
Hospital users appreciated:
✅ Easier cross-collaboration between Unit Managers and Staffing.
✅ Workers can choose shifts more easily. Text alerts are hard to sort through.
✅ Able to confirm shifts for payroll after a flex worker completes a shift.
New issues we uncovered:
❗️Surge Managers needed to be included in the workflow.
❗️ Only Staffing Admins can send out open shifts. Unit Managers cannot.
❗️Workers often forget about shifts they signed up for and need reminders.
❗️Overtime approval must be documented to hire a worker for overtime.

Results

We validated that hospitals have a need for a collaborative staffing platform like On Call, and we designed the final MVP to serve IT Agency and Hosptial users.
I compiled all testing feedback in one spreadsheet to help the team prioritize design changes based on our user testing.

Final MVP

Lessons Learned

In order to be more agile, product testing and validation can happen in stages. We focused on validating the general workflow first, before further testing and iterating on the UI.
Learning to advocate for the user experience within business constraints. In our case, developing and piloting an MVP with a more immediate client became the priority.
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