At ustwo, our work with Fresenius Medical Care spanned multiple projects, teams, and locations. At its peak, the account encompassed five digital products that sat within different parts of Fresenius' kidney care services. Over the course of two years, I was lucky to work intensively on three out of five of these products, with close collaboration and some input on all five.
The three products I was directly responsible for included the doctor-facing app, one of the patient-facing apps, and the design system that encompassed all of them.
It involved lots travel to Fresenius clinics around Europe, researching and testing with patients and doctors. We kept an open communication channel with all the doctors we'd met, who would give regular feedback on behalf of themselves and their patients as they continued to use the products.
The doctor-facing app was designed to give nephrologists and nurses more time at the bedside with patients. Rather than running back and forth between the treatment room and their closed offices, holding stacks of printed lab results and handwritten notes, doctors could quickly access key information about each patient on a small iPad that would fit into their lab coat pocket.
Some frequent and mundane tasks like minor adjustments to the dialysis settings and prescribing basic medication, could also be done on the app, as this would often come up in the moment through conversations with the patients.
The doctor app was designed to be lightweight, covering off the dozens of minor tasks a nephrologist needed to do while they were at the patient’s beside. It wasn’t intended to fully replace the heavy and complex software it pulled its data from, as some tasks required the solitude of the office to focus on.
During my time working on this the doctor app launched to 30 clinics around Europe.
The patient facing app enabled dialysis patients to gain more autonomy over their condition and treatment. It showed them information about their dialysis treatments—their session length, blood pressure, and weight loss—as well as the results from their blood tests and the medications they were prescribed.
This meant that patients had access to all their own health data, rather than waiting to hear from doctors to learn how their treatment was going. Medication reminders, practical tips, CKD-friendly recipes, and community stories meant that patients could start to see the direct impact their behaviour was having on the course of their treatment.
Alongside these two products, the team at ustwo also worked on building a similar app for patients doing their dialysis at home, and a behavioural change app for patients that were diagnosed with earlier stages of Chronic Kidney Disease that meant they didn’t need dialysis yet.
To keep this suite of products consistent in design and in code, we formed a Design Systems team that worked closely with the entire cohort, building out a component library that could be used across all.
