While cancer has been traditionally categorized based on the part of the body where tumors are found (brain, lung, etc), modern treatments more accurately categorize cancer by the underlying alterations in DNA that drive cancer growth.

Foundation Medicine, the organization behind FoundationOne, is ahead of the curve by being able to identify more potential treatment options than other available tests because they analyze all genes known to be relevant in human cancers.

Foundation Medicine has assembled and maintains a laboratory information management system applying over 50,000 algorithms against the widest amount of research conducted on known alterations, but data by itself doesn’t give doctors clarity on the available options. Medical information carries much complexity and usually requires oncologists and pathologists to think in multiple directions in order to understand the thread that ties everything together.

The user interface was designed to enable physicians to view different types of result sets – from the alterations found in the DNA, different types of white-label drug therapies, treatments still in clinical trials, and research articles around the combination of the first three results.

A team including myself performed design research in a number of capacities, through readily available printed sources, stakeholder interviews and workshops with Foundation Medicine and its chief medical officer, and in-depth discussions and workshops with partnering oncologists and pathologist across leading cancer institutions around the country. From immersing ourselves with what we learned to validating our design thinking through workshopping and journey mapping, we were able to deliver an intuitive user interface for the platform.

Watch the video below to see how a doctor typically interfaces with the platform.

The video below illustrates how a physician can use faceted search and asynchronous feedback to easily surface and organize patient results.

On the patient report workflow, it was most important for doctors to easily see which options were available for each alteration, while being able to interact with options and research without having to leave the page. This led to the use of a persistent navigation creating a customized accordion interface that hid items out of view while scrolling to the appropriate sections of selected areas.

As physicians have long-term relationships with their patients, it was common to receive updates on new treatments or research, and we needed to ensure that users could filter down with immediate response to get to the most crucial updates.

Here, I designed a view that prioritized research around an alteration while making it easy to identify the availability of related therapies, or trials and references to them.

+

Recipient of an Interaction Professional Notable from Core77’s 2013 Design Awards.

Patent application filed for the experience design, viewable here