Healthcare Synergy: How I Redesigned a 30-Year-Old EMR Into a Mobile App That Cut Visit Documentation From 30 Minutes to Under 10

A mobile-first redesign of a home health and post-acute care EMR, streamlining every visit from clock-in to patient signature, cutting visit documentation time by over 66% while reducing errors and maintaining compliance.

Year

2026

Role

Product Designer

Team

Design, Product Management, Engineering

See Product ↗

  • The Story

A three-decade-old system. Nurses depended on it in the field. The mobile experience hadn't kept up.

Picture a home health nurse with multiple patients to visit today. Different neighborhoods, different conditions, different care needs. Between visits, she's opening an app that was never quite built for this moment, hunting through cluttered menus, outdated design, and poor navigation, losing valuable time to paperwork.

Healthcare Synergy had served home health and post-acute care providers since 1993. But as the industry modernized, nurses found themselves overwhelmed by a system that slowed down their efficiency. They needed more than a refresh. They needed an experience rebuilt entirely around how they actually worked, on the go.

The opportunity wasn't to fix a broken product. It was to build a mobile experience that gave nurses more time for what actually mattered — patient care.

  • The Problem

Nurses had one job: delivering care. Navigating software that couldn't keep up on the road made it feel like two.

I started with the existing experience and conducted in-depth interviews with stakeholders and the nurses who used it daily.

Recording each visit, from vitals to notes to electronic visit verification, was taking 30 minutes or more. For a nurse with multiple patients a day, that's hours lost. Three recurring frustrations came up in every interview:

  • Navigation that didn't reflect how nurses think about their day

  • No sense of visit progress. Nurses couldn't tell at a glance what was done and what was still required

  • A map and directions feature so unusable that nurses had abandoned it for a separate app entirely

  • The Users

Two people. One visit. Both need it to work.

Home health nurses move fast. Multiple patients a day, different homes, different care needs; no two visits are the same. At the end of every visit, one more person needs the app to work — the patient.

  • The Approach

Design for the visit. Not the software.

I organized every design decision around the nurse's day: before, during, and after the visit, not around features or navigation structure.

  1. Research and evaluation

    Stakeholder and nurse interviews. Heuristic evaluation of the old desktop and mobile app. The before screenshots became a constant reference point throughout the project.

  1. Information architecture

    Rebuilt around the nurse's mental model. The home screen surfaces what matters right now: upcoming appointments, unread messages, patient access.

  1. Flow and design

    Every critical flow was mapped end-to-end, then carried directly into high-fidelity screens built for field use: glanceable information, minimal typing, clear progress, and no dead ends.

  1. Usability testing with real nurses

    We tested each key flow against one measure: did the new design make documentation faster, less error-prone, and easier to complete? The results confirmed it. Zero errors across all flows. 100% task completion. 8 out of 10 nurses rated the experience as very satisfied; the remaining 2 as satisfied.

Key Design Decision

A nurse cannot collect a patient signature until every required element is documented. The sequence was intentional. The signature is confirmation that care was fully delivered, not just a formality.

  • The Design

Every screen built for one context: a nurse, a patient's home, no room for friction.

Home — Surfaces unread messages, inbox alerts, and upcoming appointments immediately. Full patient list one tap away.

Appointments — Every appointment one tap from directions. Clock In, Collect Vitals, Take Notes, Track Miles, Clock Out, Collect Patient Signature. Progress visible throughout. Nothing skipped.

Chat — Two-way messaging with group chat support. Start a conversation, add multiple recipients, and communicate with the care team without leaving the app.

Messages — A full message center with inbox, drafts, sent, and trash. Nothing falls through the cracks.

Beyond the visit — the web application

The mobile app was built for the road. The web application handles everything else: Patient Intake, Patient Chart, Medication Profile, Document Board, and the Home dashboard.

  • The Impact

30 minutes of visit documentation. Now under 10.

Visit documentation was taking 30 minutes or more per visit. The redesign brought that under 10 minutes — giving nurses back hours that now go to patient care, not paperwork.


Error rates dropped. EVV compliance was maintained without adding friction. And a 30-year-old system that nurses had been tolerating became a tool they could rely on in the field.

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Or shoot me an email at giftobidokachi@gmail.com

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