• Dave Walsh

Scope

The UX working group is defining and developing the user experience component of Project Unify. Users of electronic devices have grown accustomed to intuitive, easy-to-use and secure User eXperiences. The modern, microservice-oriented, interoperable architecture that we are envisioning to support multi-domain health and well-being provides a great deal of flexibility in designing user-facing applications. With the advent of smart phones, desktop devices and even smart watches, we have the potential for users to access complex health and human services solutions from a wide array of devices.

With all the potential flexibility at our disposal, we could end up presenting a very confusing and varying set of user interfaces for users across all their devices. This working group is defining a platform that will make it easy to write meaningful applications with common user experience across multiple, different platforms. The goal is to provide a UX tool for developers to use to satisfy the CMS/ONC rules on interoperability more easily.

1. Investigated Flutter, a UX tool popular in open-source communities.
2. Defined appropriate use cases to guide UX development, such as a survey questionnaire that could be applied to both health and human services SDoH assessments.
3. Created a user-interface wireframe design for a survey questionnaire app.
4. Created, using Flutter, a questionnaire app UI.
5. Implemented underlying questionnaire app logic, integrating the UI with related local and remote* data structures such as FHIR resources.
6. Demonstrated the app performing Create Read Update and Delete operations on QuestionnaireResponse and Observation FHIR Resources housed on the Michigan Health Information Network (MiHIN) InteroperabilityLand test environment.
7. Demonstrated how the app can be deployed as on the web, mobile (Android, iPhone) or desktop.

* Remote data access via FHIR has been defined by the Project Unify FHIR Security WG working in parallel with the UX WG to define a Smart-on-FHIR open-source library to easily support access to FHIR Resources from any app, front-end application or back-end server. Areas that need to be addressed by such a library include managing HTTPS calls, parsing and generating JSON data, and supporting multiple devices (iPhone, Android, MAC, Windows or Linux desktops, etc.).