ORtelligence: Surgical Tool Tracking

Problem Statement

Surgical teams relied on manual tracking inside an already demanding operating-room workflow. A missing or unaccounted-for instrument could delay the work and create a patient-safety risk.

Goals & Success Metrics

1. Missing instruments: Make an unaccounted-for item easier to identify and resolve.
2. Preparation: Test whether the workflow could improve preparation speed by 25%.
3. Procedure time: Explore whether better instrument tracking could contribute to a 15% reduction in overall operation time.

Turning Wireframes into High-Fidelity Designs

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

1. Navigation: I kept the main scanning and count actions visible so nurses and surgeons did not have to search through the app.
2. Core tasks: The wireframes prioritised scanning, live count status and quick instrument search.

User Feedback & Collaboration

1. Feedback sessions: I held weekly reviews with a small group of operating-room nurses and used their feedback to revise the interface.
2. Design and engineering: I reviewed real-time data syncing and hospital-database integration with the developers as the design changed.

Beta Testing

The beta was used in two pilot hospitals. We ran focused sessions with surgical teams to find problems and decide what to change next.

Usability Feedback

Nurses found the scanning flow fast but asked for a simpler way to find rarely used instruments.

Some surgeons asked for offline support during network disruption.

IT staff required encryption for patient and hospital information.

Changes after testing: I made frequently used tools easier to reach, added an offline scanning cache and revised the security requirements with the team.

Initial Challenge

ORtelligence asked Digica to design a mobile app that could manage surgical instruments through scanning. Operating-room teams work quickly, so the product had to fit the existing count workflow and make its status clear at a glance.

User Research Insights

1. Surgeons: Needed fast, reliable instrument identification without taking attention away from the procedure.
2. Nurses and attending staff: Needed a shorter process for tracking instruments and resolving a count.
3. IT staff: Needed the app to exchange data with hospital records and inventory systems without repeated manual entry.

Scanning workflow

I mapped the main workflows for surgeons, nurses and IT administrators with the Digica product team. We prioritised:

1. Scanning: Identify instruments through QR codes or RFID tags with as few steps as possible.
2. Live status: Update the operating-room dashboard with each instrument’s location, availability and usage history.
3. Inventory alerts: Show low inventory or a missing instrument as soon as the system detects it.

We initially considered voice-activated commands but found that background OR noise interfered with accuracy. This validated our choice to invest in a scanning feature instead.

Key Outcomes

The design work focused on the mobile count workflow: identify the kit, review what is missing, confirm the count and recover from an interrupted scan.

The key interface decision was to keep count status and recovery actions visible without asking the team to switch between tools.

My contribution: The mobile workflow made kit identification, missing-item review, confirmation and recovery states visible to the operating-room team.

This case study documents my interface contribution and does not attribute operational outcomes to the design alone.