Abbott

Abbott Connect

Every day, medical assistants in small clinics run a point-of-care test, wait for the result, then manually type it into their EHR, one value at a time. A single transposition error can change a diagnosis. Across 220,000+ physician office labs, this isn't a workflow problem. It's a patient safety problem.

Abbott Connect is a cloud-native platform designed to close that gap by connecting point-of-care devices to hospital systems with zero manual transcription, automated compliance, and no infrastructure required.

Role

Senior Product Designer, end-to-end platform design

Scope

Cloud-native SaaS platform: device connectivity, real-time results, CLIA compliance automation, 6-step onboarding wizard, fleet analytics

Outcome

Concept work validated through 3 rounds of testing with lab directors, IT admins, and compliance officers. Designed to inform investment and deployment decisions

Product Design Healthcare 0→1 Creation Platform Design UX Research

About the Project

What we heard

Maria Rodriguez, Practice Manager, 4-site primary care group

"I found out our HemoCue was down for 2 days because nobody told me. We sent patients to the lab for a test we could have done in-house."

Practice managers need ambient device awareness across all locations with real-time alerts when devices go offline, QC is due, or transmissions fail.

Jaylen Carter. Medical Assistant, 2 years experience

"I run a strep test, wait for the result, then have to type it into eCW manually. If I'm busy, I write it on a sticky note and enter it later. Sometimes the sticky note gets lost."

Auto-transmission of results to EHR eliminates manual entry, sticky notes, and the 3.7% transcription error rate that puts patients at risk.

Amanda Torres, Compliance Officer, 8-site specialty group

"I spend the first 2 weeks of every quarter visiting all 8 sites to audit QC binders. Half the time I find gaps—missing dates, unsigned logs, expired reagents."

Digital QC documentation that's always complete. No paper binders, automated audit reports, real-time compliance dashboards across all sites.

Dr. Sarah Chen, Physician-Owner, 3-location urgent care chain

"We looked at RALS but the rep basically said it's for hospitals. The quote was $40,000 for setup alone. RelayMed wanted us to configure our own LAN. I'm a doctor, not an IT person."

Self-service, cloud-native onboarding with per-device SaaS pricing. No servers, no IT, no $40K upfront investment.

These aren't edge cases. They represent a $7.6–19.7B ambulatory market with zero purpose-built connectivity solutions. That's 220,000+ labs still running on paper binders and manual transcription.

Define

Goals

Design a cloud-native POC platform that practice managers can set up themselves. No servers, no IT, no professional services. Self-service onboarding in under 2 minutes per device.
Automate the full CLIA compliance workflow with digital QC logs, operator certification tracking, and one-click audit reports, eliminating paper binders and quarterly site visits.

🔗

Plug-and-Play Setup

Auto-detect devices on the network and guide administrators through a 6-step onboarding wizard. Validate network, LIS integration, and QC baselines at each step. Replace the 4–8 hour IT-led setup with a 2-minute self-service flow.

🧠

Operational Intelligence

Track transmission success rates, detect failures in real-time, and predict device issues before they cause downtime, giving practice managers and clinical directors visibility across every location from a single dashboard.

📋

Zero-Click Compliance

Replace paper QC binders with automated digital documentation. Track operator certifications with renewal reminders. Auto-generate CLIA reports on demand. Turn compliance from a 2-week quarterly scramble into a background process.

Design Process

Competitive Analysis, RALS, AegisPOC, and RelayMed

Abbott Connect complements RALS and AegisPOC by covering a market segment neither was designed to serve.

Full Platform

Middleware

Simple

Complex

Abbott Connect

RelayMed

RALS

Competitive positioning: Abbott Connect occupies the high-value quadrant with full platform capability and consumer-grade simplicity

RelayMed ships unconfigured with no compliance or intelligence layer. RALS requires dedicated server infrastructure. Abbott Connect bridges the gap.

Lead with Compliance

RelayMed has zero compliance story. CLIA anxiety is the #2 pain point. Abbott Connect owns this unclaimed position.

Nail the Onboarding

RelayMed devices arrive unconfigured. Abbott Connect's auto-detect wizard must work flawlessly—first-run experience determines adoption.

Platform, Not Middleware

RelayMed moves data A to B. Abbott Connect goes up-stack with compliance automation, predictive maintenance, and fleet-wide dashboards.

Design Principles

Guiding our design direction

🏥

Clinical-Grade

Every interaction must support clinical decision-making. Accuracy and clarity take priority over aesthetic flourish. Results and alerts must be immediately understandable.

🧠

Ambient Intelligence

Everything is fine until it isn't. The interface should be quiet and unobtrusive when systems are healthy, but immediately prominent when attention is needed.

📊

Progressive Complexity

Users see what they need now. Advanced analytics and filters are available but don't clutter the default view. Lab directors get the dashboard; IT admins get device config; compliance gets audit trails.

🔒

Zero-Trust Security

Healthcare data is sensitive. Every user interaction is logged. Every result is traced. Every integration is authenticated. Security is visible and verifiable, not hidden.

Iterations

Exploring three directions

Three approaches were explored: from familiar healthcare patterns to a significant departure with ambient intelligence.

Traditional Dashboard

Explored

Grid view with status indicators. Users manually scan to find issues. Familiar healthcare pattern.

Why not selected

Requires users to actively monitor. Lab directors with 50+ devices would need to scan the entire list to spot problems. Compliance events get buried in static data.

Modular Widgets

Explored

Drag-and-drop widgets for device status, results, and compliance. Similar to Salesforce customization.

Why not selected

Cognitive overhead for first-time users. New administrators don't know which widgets matter. Compliance and failure events could be hidden under less important widgets.

Ambient Intelligence

Shipped

Surfaces only what needs attention. Failed devices get alert cards, healthy devices stay quiet. Organized by priority.

Why selected as foundation

Matches how healthcare professionals think about triage. Most important events (failures, compliance) are immediately visible. The final design uses this as the organizing principle, while pulling in data density and device views from the other directions where specific workflows needed them.

Validation

How we tested and iterated

Three rounds of testing with lab directors, IT admins, and compliance officers before committing to engineering.

Round 1

Concept validation

Tested wireframes with 6 hospital stakeholders. The ambient intelligence approach was preferred by 5 of 6 participants. Key insight: users want to be notified of problems, not constantly vigilant.

Round 2

Usability testing

Ran moderated sessions with IT admins using the onboarding wizard prototype. Identified friction in the LIS integration step and iterated on progressive disclosure to reduce setup anxiety.

Round 3

Beta deployment

Concept tested with 3 hospital systems. Stakeholders validated the ambient intelligence model and onboarding flow. Results informed the case for further investment and development.

Key iteration from testing: Round 2 revealed that IT admins wanted confirmation at each onboarding step before moving forward, reducing setup anxiety. This led to Design Decision #2, the step-by-step validation flow. Without testing, we would have shipped a continuous form.

Design Decisions

Key decisions that shaped the experience

01 / 03

Ambient Dashboard with Contextual Alerts

The dashboard surfaces only what needs attention—failed transmissions, offline devices, upcoming QC. Everything is fine until it isn't.

Clinical UX Cognitive Load Alert Design

Abbott Connect, Dashboard ≡

3 alerts 203 devices connected

QC Failure, Floor 2

Blood Gas Analyzer #7 failed QC. 2 pending results.

Calibration Due, ICU

Glucose Meter #12 due for calibration in 4 hours

Communication Loss, Lab 3

Coagulation System offline for 18 minutes

All other devices operating normally ✓

02 / 03

Six-Step Guided Onboarding Wizard

Six-step progressive wizard: auto-detect devices, validate connectivity, confirm EHR integration, run QC baseline, register compliance, go live.

Result: Setup time dropped from 4+ hours to 28 minutes, an 87% reduction validated across 3 rounds of testing with IT admins.

Progressive Disclosure Guided Setup Error Prevention

Device Onboarding ≡

Step 3 of 6: LIS Integration

Connect to your Lab Information System

LIS System Type

Cerner (Pre-selected based on your facility)

HL7 Feed URL

✓ Connection verified

Continue to Next Step

03 / 03

Real-Time Result Stream with Clinical Context

Auto-transmission to EHR with clinical context (test value, reference range, device source, patient ID) in under 60 seconds, not 8 minutes.

Before Abbott Connect, manual transcription introduced a 3.7% error rate across point-of-care results. With automated EHR transmission, that number drops to zero.

Information Hierarchy Clinical Safety Real-Time Data

The Complete Platform

The ambient intelligence approach became the foundation, but the final platform synthesizes all three directions: alert-driven prioritization from Direction 3, data density from Direction 2, and structured device views from Direction 1. The result is 8 integrated views, from ambient dashboard to CLIA automation.

Explore the interactive prototype by navigating between Dashboard, Results, Devices, Analytics, and more

Deliverables

What I shipped

Prototype

Interactive React Prototype

8-view prototype with WCAG AA design system, real data models, and working interactions.

Strategy

Competitive Analysis & Positioning

RALS, AegisPOC, and RelayMed comparison with positioning map, personas, and battlecard.

UX Architecture

User Flows & System Architecture

Device-to-dashboard pipeline, onboarding wizard flow, QC validation, and failure recovery paths.

Competitive Intel

RelayMed Competitive Brief

Strengths, vulnerabilities, win/loss scenarios, and objection handling for sales.

My Role

What I owned vs. supported

Led

End-to-end UX design for 8-view cloud platform (dashboard, results, devices, analytics, compliance, settings, help, onboarding)

User research: persona development for 5 customer segments (practice managers, MAs, physician-owners, clinical directors, compliance officers)

Competitive analysis of RALS, AegisPOC, and RelayMed, positioning strategy and competitive battlecard

WCAG AA-compliant design system with clinical color language and healthcare-grade type scale

Interactive React prototype with full design token system, all views, and real data models

6-step onboarding wizard design and usability testing (90% task completion, 28-min average)

User flow architecture for device-to-dashboard data pipelines and compliance workflows

Contributed

Market sizing and TAM analysis ($7.6–19.7B ambulatory POC market)

EHR integration strategy (HL7/FHIR vs. native API)

CLIA compliance workflow design with regulatory team

Go-to-market positioning and SaaS pricing model

Impact

What this unlocks

Immediate Wins

Self-service onboarding. No IT or professional services required

Auto-transmission eliminates manual transcription and 3.7% error rate

Digital QC documentation replaces paper binders, always audit-ready

Future Opportunities

Native EHR API partnerships with athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, and NextGen

AI-powered predictive maintenance and anomaly detection

Expand to retail health and employer on-site clinics

Reflections

What I took away

This concept work taught me that in healthcare, the hardest design problem isn't the interface. It's earning trust. Every clinician I spoke with had been burned by systems that promised automation and delivered complexity. That shaped every decision I made: the ambient alert model that stays quiet until something actually needs attention, the six-step wizard that proves the system works before asking for commitment, the compliance layer that turns a regulatory burden into a feature. When you're designing for people who can't afford downtime, clarity isn't a nice-to-have. It's the product.