ClinicaSlim

Overview

Clinical Sim, is a healthcare app that will help healthcare professionals (specifically nurses and nursing students) practice different clinical skills. The goal here is to have quick access to practice these clinical skills in a simulation/game format. With other features, the application will be very engaging and help users perform well in hospitals and clinics by decreasing their stress levels.

Methodology used

Problem statement

Nursing professionals (nurses and nursing students) may feel stressed and unconfident if they fail to master a specific technique/clinical skill. With the Clinical Sim app, we want our users to feel confident in their abilities, reduce their stress, and be efficient in hospitals and clinics.

Competitive Analysis

I analyzed two competitors. A medical simulation app (Full Code) and NurseSim (nursing simulation software). I identified their strengths and weaknesses.

Full Code is a medical simulation app. It has complex clinical cases in a 3D emergency room. Users have challenges in a form of a clinical case to solve and they can practice realistic diagnosis and treatments. This app is for medical students, nursing students, residents, paramedics, nurses, PAs.

NurseSim is a nursing & 3D eLearning simulation software. Nurses and nursing students can practice over 100 clinical skills simulations on their computers any place, anytime, anywhere. The software is developed by an Australian firm ‘’ETRAIN Interactive’’.

Executive Summary Analysis

Target Audience

Competition

Risk

Opportunities

This app is made for Nurse professionals who are new to the profession or have less than five years of experience. For example, interns, nursing students, new graduates and junior nurses.

The competition is not huge fortunately for us. We found competitors close to our app’s objective and we analyzed them. For example, Full Code is a good medical simulation app. However, their focus is more on clinical thinking than on clinical practice. Otherwise, there are also Virtual Reality games like SimXvr and medical simulation software like NurseSim are great competitors and the competition is at a high level with those.

The major risk of this application is the design layout of the simulation itself. We want something simple, understandable and appealing. However, we don’t want it to be expensive with 3D simulations.

By analyzing the big competitors to our project on the market, we found an opportunity to have more visibility. We will focus on our marketing strategy. We have noticed that other competitors have a poor marketing strategy and this affects their results.

User Research

Survey

User Interview

I used Google Forms to create my survey.

Respondents include members of the Canadian Nurses Facebook group as well as family and friends who are nurses. They filled out the form anonymously

After the survey, I conducted user interviews with three people from my network in the nursing field.

Through Zoom video calls.

Here were my finding after the interviews:

All the participants live in Montreal, Canada.
In order to make sure they are following the right protocol or doing the right thing, participants prefer to refer to their colleagues or hospital protocol. In order to avoid making mistakes, they don’t use random websites or apps.
Users want access to the future application on the phone quickly, with a simulation that explains and illustrates the steps (2-3 minutes). Their goal is to use it in their daily lives rather than just as a game to pass the time.
It is easier for users to visualize protocols if they include images and illustrations rather than just texts and they must visualize the steps.
The users say that a website version is convenient if they are at their desk or at the nurses’ station but having quick access to the information anywhere and anytime, having the app on their phone is much more convenient.
It was preferred by two of the three participants to have an application that walked them through a clinical skill step-by-step.
Two users report that they will be using our app more frequently at work when they want to refresh their memory or to be sure about a specific clinical skill. The nursing student is the only one who will use the app at home, at her internship, at school, or on the bus to practice multiple times.
Because users don’t have the time to play games on their phones, they don’t download any games app for fun.
The nursing student participant, however, said she has numerous nursing apps that have quizzes to help her prepare for the NCLEX (NCLEX, which stands for National Council Licensure Examination, refers generally to one of the two standardized tests nurses need to pass in order to become either a licensed practical nurse (LPN) or a registered nurse (RN)). For example: Canadian NCLEX RN Mastery.

Affinity Map

I created an affinity map based on the key finding from the user interviews. I divided my finding into 9 categories and tried to find solutions to each one.

This information helped me establish my Persona.