Quick Summary
Problem: Paper-based workflows caused fragmented data, poor coordination, and 4–6 hour patient visits at se
Approach: Digitized the full patient journey with real-time tracking, shared records, and clinician-first workflows
Role: Workflow design, usability testing, stakeholder alignment, front-end support
Outcome:
Average patient wait times reduced 3.7 → 2.5 hours
Real-time coordination across departments and centralized patient records
Transform a completely paper-based ophthalmology center with 1,000+ daily patients into a digitally efficient operation while reducing patient wait times, preserving data integrity, and improving interdepartmental communication.
Create an integrated digital system that streamlines patient journeys, maintains comprehensive digital records, and enables real-time coordination between all hospital departments.
Interaction Design
Workflow Management
Stakeholder Management
Prototyping
UX Research
Figma
HTML
CSS
Angular
ClickUp
Optometrists
Ophthalmologists
Medical Counselors
Hospital Administration
Accounts Staff
Timestream Technologies is a tech-first organization specializing in enterprise-level healthcare solutions for hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and specialty departments. With our ophthalmology management system, we aim to keep patients and staff aligned in real time. Patients can view their journey status, understand next steps, and receive digital prescriptions and records. This helps minimize wait times while ensuring seamless healthcare delivery.
Our focus for this ophthalmology solution is creating a system that tracks every step of the patient journey, from registration to final dispensing of medications or eyewear. We encountered major challenges with existing paper-based processes that were leading to 4-6 hour patient visits. By transforming these workflows into digital processes, we aimed to significantly reduce wait times, improve data integrity, and enhance interdepartmental communication.
Our client was primarily using just paper and physical mediums to keep track of all information, with patient data relying heavily on doctors' memories and handwritten notes. This caused significant confusion when patients saw different optometrists, requiring lengthy back-and-forth communication to establish patient history. With over 1000 patients daily, visits were extending to 4-6 hours, creating bottlenecks throughout the facility. Additionally, staff at each station had to repeatedly write the same information for a single patient journey, resulting in inefficient workflows and physical files that patients might not maintain properly.
For critical administrative tasks like insurance billing, hospital staff had to scramble to gather documents from multiple departments, causing delays even at discharge. The storage of these paper records was also becoming problematic, creating organizational challenges and potential fire hazards as physical space for document storage was diminishing rapidly.
Market competitor analysis was also done by the design team to understand the standard practices in ophthalmology software and identify opportunities for innovation.
Extremely detailed forms
Relies heavily on keyboard inputs
No presets
Connects patient registrations, visits, and prescriptions
Patient updates via messages
Templatization of repeatable tasks
Lack of flexibility in process
Detailed views and anatomical diagram library
On-screen button based inputs
Color coding for each eye
Charting for tracking various eye related metrics
In depth patient history module
Lack of flexibility in process
As the software is primarily going to be running in B2B scenarios, particularly ophthalmology centers that might integrate with our existing hospital management system, we felt it would be more fitting to create user profiles around the roles they represent rather than creating personas around user behaviors. This allows us to know which users are meant to be given training for which parts of the software and also narrow down on their daily operations.
For this case study, we will be looking at the workflows and processes from the point of view of optometrists and ophthalmologists, though our system also serves medical counselors, billing staff, store personnel, and hospital administration. A single eye-related visit has many steps in the process from entering the hospital to seeing the doctor and getting a prescription. All steps can be tracked in the software to have a hospital-level overview and analyze bottlenecks in the existing procedures and protocols being followed.
Key Pain Points
🔍 No Digital Patient History
Doctors can't access past records digitally and must rely on patient memory or physical documents, leading to incomplete diagnoses and repeated testing.
⏱️ Manual Dilation Monitoring Burden
Staff must physically check and track over 100 patients in darkened rooms, creating safety risks with eye dilation timing and inefficient use of clinical resources.
📝 Handwritten Prescription Risks
Prescriptions written on paper slips or the back of billing forms risk being lost, misinterpreted, or incorrectly filled, with no central record maintained.
⚠️ No Real-Time Department Coordination
With no digital tracking between departments, patients get "lost" in the system, staff can't anticipate incoming workload, and wait times extend to 4-6 hours per visit.
🗄️ Inefficient Document Management
Physical storage of thousands of patient records creates fire hazards, wastes space, and makes retrieving past information time-consuming and often impossible.
The Impact
😤 Patient frustration from excessive waiting (4-6 hours for a single visit)
⚕ Decreased quality of care due to incomplete medical histories
⏰ Clinical staff spending 30-40% of time on administrative tasks rather than patient care
💊 Treatment errors from misinterpreted handwritten prescriptions
📊 Inability to analyze treatment effectiveness over time
After analyzing ophthalmology center challenges, we developed streamlined workflows to transform the patient journey. Our central concept was creating a real-time patient tracking system with instant access to complete medical records across all departments.
We maintained the center's established clinical processes but enhanced each step with digital capabilities—replacing paper handoffs with electronic notifications, implementing automatic alerts for time-sensitive procedures, and creating digital prescriptions. This integrated approach aimed to dramatically reduce the 4-6 hour wait times while improving clinical accuracy for the 1,000+ daily patients.
The following sketches are a part of the process of the entire ophthalmology management feature set. These designs are a representation of the possible features, focusing on the primary functionality that we want to cover—from patient registration and tracking to digital prescription management and interdepartmental communication.
Due to strict timelines, research was lightweight. We spoke with key stakeholders (doctors and admins) and reviewed patient flow pain points, which shaped initial wireframes.
The main objective while designing the wire frame was that each and every section of a page should be easily accessible via the keyboard. Often times the ophthalmologists and optometrists would have their at least one hand occupied while conducting tests, making it difficult for them to use both mouse AND keyboard.
To achieve this objective, we focused on presenting the input options to the user the second the focus shifts to an input field. This would allow the user to quickly choose an option based on their previously filled in details.
To capture authentic feedback, we visited the client's ophthalmology center to gain a proper understanding of their real-world operations versus our proposed solution. The objective was to gather input from all the relevant staff members who would be interacting with the software—from optometrists and ophthalmologists to administrative personnel. By simulating real-world scenarios with them, we could provide a more accurate picture of the product in development and ensure it would seamlessly integrate into their daily workflows.
Most of the suggestions originated from their real world utilization and their existing processes that largely comprise of data entry on paper. This also gave us the opportunity to gauge how receptive staff members were to the proposed solutions. Their feedback primarily involved the processes in the software that did not fully capture information that was recorded in their physical documents, or corrections to terminology and sequence of events.
One of our biggest challenges was integrating the eye examination interface. Optometrists work with standardized criteria and values, so we initially proposed a mixed approach combining both text and mouse-based inputs for data entry.
This particular section required extensive iteration and feedback cycles. The primary point of contention became the excessive amount of information displayed on screen, including the patient information header section. While the patient information section functioned well across other workflow pages, the examinations interface felt extremely cluttered and overwhelming.
To address this issue, we redesigned the patient information header to present data more efficiently without overloading users while still maintaining access to all necessary patient details. The refined version can be seen in the final screen designs, where we achieved a cleaner interface that better supports the clinical examination workflow.
In an ophthalmology center, observing medical professionals during actual patient care proved challenging due to patient confidentiality, safety regulations, and the discomfort patients might experience with third parties present during examinations. We relied on post-consultation feedback from optometrists and ophthalmologists, as well as simulated real-world scenarios to understand their workflows.
During scenario testing, staff members would occasionally skip steps to expedite the process. We had to encourage them to treat these simulations as genuine patient interactions to capture accurate workflow requirements.
As the project progressed, the number of stakeholders on the client side continued to grow, leading to significant scope creep throughout development. Stakeholder management became crucial for project success and timely delivery. While it was challenging, we were able to manage scope creep as much as possible without disregarding genuine feedback from core users. With an increasing number of voices providing input, we had to carefully balance broader organizational requests with the essential needs identified by the primary users who would interact with the system daily.
The screens showcased below are some of the final screens that were implemented in the final application. The design system utilized was the existing design system for our web application, extended to handle some use cases for different kinds of input interactions such as mouse, and hover effects.
At the time of writing, the web platform with ophthalmology features has been in the market since January 2025. Some of the main impacts include:
Patient wait times reduced from an average of 3.7 hours to 2.5 hours, with wait times trending to go lower.
Communication between departments is instantaneous with real time updates to all users.
Patient documentation is now available in one spot, making the overall claim filing process simpler for TPA/Claims and settlement staff.
Providing small modifications throughout the entire process in a hospital led to significant wait time reductions without specifically targeting them.
Deep operational context (like typical order volumes) informed better interface decisions than user preferences alone.
Users are initially reluctant to change in workflows until it is presented to them to use in their typical setting.
Technical solutions can only resolve a portion of the problem, but processes at their core need to be tweaked to achieve a desirable outcome.
The next step to streamline the overall workflow is to allow patient to be connected with the software via a patient portal.
Given only 3 months, I learned how to balance speed with stakeholder alignment. In the future, I’d introduce lightweight usability testing earlier.
