cEMR

Designing a Community EMR for Integrated and Culturally-Safe Care

Overview

Over two years, I led the product design of a comprehensive community Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system for an Indigenous software solutions company. The goal was to transform how healthcare providers deliver integrated, culturally safe, and community-centered care—with a particular focus on Indigenous communities.

Problem

Most EMR systems are designed for urban clinical environments and fail to reflect the holistic needs of community health providers. This project aimed to build a system that would:

  • Respect Indigenous approaches to healing

  • Support interdisciplinary teams and varied roles

  • Integrate medical and traditional health practices

  • Enable real-time collaboration across multiple agencies

My Role

Title: Product Designer

Duration: 28 months

Team: CEO, Business Director, Agile development team, QA, and clinical advisors

Responsibilities:

  • Led discovery and design strategy

  • Conducted stakeholder interviews and usability testing

  • Designed and iterated high-fidelity UI across all modules

  • Developed and maintained the design system

  • Facilitated presentations and feedback sessions with stakeholders

Process

1. Discovery & Research

I partnered with leadership to guide discovery through stakeholder interviews, journey mapping, and contextual inquiry. Our research revealed gaps in:

  • Communication and coordination between health teams

  • Support for traditional and cultural practices in care delivery

  • Respectful data practices and trauma-informed design

Key Activities:

  • Interviews with clinical staff, subject matter experts, and developers

  • Workflow mapping of community and clinical roles

  • Review of existing EMRs and interoperability challenges

2. Design Strategy 

Based on research, I developed personas and experience maps to guide ideation. The core pillars of the design were:

  • Cultural Safety: Options to document traditional medicine and ceremony

  • Holistic View: Unified health summary including community programs, cultural practices, and medical care

  • Scalability: Modular platform adaptable to diverse community needs

  • Personas

  • Immunization flow

3. Design & Co-Creation

Working within an Agile environment, I delivered design assets in sprints and continuously iterated based on team and stakeholder feedback.

Collaborative Deliverables:

  • Dashboard with tasks, alerts, and client insights

  • Client Profile with personal, cultural, and community information

  • Charting tools supporting clinical and traditional care plans

  • Programs & Services module for community-based health supports

  • Templates for various care contexts

  • Admin interfaces for governance and user management

  • Dashboard

  • Patient Profiles

  • Patient Profile

  • Charting

  • Community Health

  • Templates

4. Presentation & Validation

I led regular design reviews and feedback sessions with internal teams, including nurses, subject matter experts, and business management.

  • Incorporated real-time feedback into sprint cycles

  • Maintained documentation of design rationale and decision logs

  • Advocated for cultural validation processes involving community advisors

5. Design System

To ensure consistency and maintainability, I developed a custom design system that included:

  • Accessible colour palette

  • Grid-based layout system

  • Components tailored to clinical use (form-heavy, legible, mobile-friendly)

  • Scalable typographic hierarchy

  • Status pills colour system

  • Typography

Outcomes

  • Supported a successful pilot launch across multiple communities

  • Reduced time spent on administrative tasks via contextual, user-friendly charting tools

  • Increased user satisfaction, especially among Indigenous care workers and service coordinators

Reflection

This was one of the most meaningful and complex projects of my career. It required deep UX expertise alongside cultural empathy, systems thinking, and healthcare ethics. I'm proud to have helped design a product that supports whole-person care while honoring both clinical and traditional knowledge.

Tools & Skills

Tools: Figma, Axure, Jira, Claude

Skills: UX Research, UI Design, Interaction Design, Design System, Agile Collaboration, Healthcare Design