Designing a Scalable Incident Reporting System for Healthcare

Reducing friction, underreporting, and administrative overhead in high-stakes clinical environments.

Company

ThriveWorks

Role

UX Design

Timeline

2023

Platform

Web

Summary

ThriveWorks is a concept incident reporting system for nursing staff and administrators in long-term care settings. The goal was to reduce underreporting by making incident reporting faster, clearer, and less intimidating.

Over five weeks, we used research and iterative design to simplify reporting and case management. The final high-fidelity prototype emphasizes clarity, efficiency, and psychological safety, supporting both frontline staff and administrators across different levels of technical experience.

Objectives

  • Design a scalable incident reporting system using a human-centered approach

  • Support users across varying levels of technical proficiency

  • Reduce administrative friction for both nursing staff and administrators

  • Enable efficient case management as volume scales from individual reports to large case loads

My contributions

I led the UX design for core reporting and case-management workflows, including form creation, case reassignment, and the population of regulatory documentation (e.g., Workers’ Compensation and OSHA forms). I also designed system features such as dark mode and multilingual support to improve accessibility and adoption.

Throughout the project, I collaborated closely with my teammate to ensure consistency across the system and alignment between staff-facing and administrative experiences.

The challenge

Incident reporting in healthcare environments is often time-consuming, emotionally charged, and prone to underreporting. The challenge was to design a system that felt shame-free, intuitive, and efficient—encouraging accurate reporting while minimizing administrative burden.

A key focus was simplifying complex forms, reducing duplicate data entry, and guiding users through multi-step workflows with clear feedback and next steps.

User groups

  • Nursing staff

  • Nursing home admins

User needs

  • Reduce time spent on reporting and case management

  • Eliminate duplicate data entry across reports and forms

  • Enable clear staff–admin communication throughout a case

  • Support case prioritization with pinning and visual status cues

Research + define

About incident reporting systems

After doing secondary research about similar products, it was important to understand what the minimum requirements are, as well. as limitations that a system like this one requires, so that when staff or admins are filling out reports/cases, they’ve got all the information they need. It’s also imperative to create a shame and guilt-free application that encourages sharing as much information about the incident as possible.

Product requirements

• Dynamic and responsive design

• Flexible; usable by all departments; of all technology levels

• Ability to switch to another language for people who are not native English speakers and feel insecure about filling out reports (underreporting)

• Scalability and sustainability (easy to code and maintain for developers)

• Seamless and intuitive user experience

Design precedents:

The solution

The proposed solution introduces a clean, trustworthy interface designed to reduce friction during incident reporting and case management. A calm visual system paired with clear hierarchy helps users focus on required tasks without unnecessary cognitive load.

Key features include threaded communication, status tracking through an activity timeline, and guided assistance via a chatbot to support first-time users and reduce uncertainty during reporting.

Features

  • Ability to create/edit report and save for later completion

  • Ability to pin any case/report to the top of the page for easy access

  • Ability to reassign cases from one admin to another, as well as include a custom message when sending the transfer request

  • A chatbot feature for frequently asked questions, and to get support when filling out reports/handling cases

  • Ability to switch languages for users who are not native English speakers (all info will be translated for review before submitting)

Concept map

  • Identify minimum requirements

  • Discover areas of innovation and potential new features

  • Lay out design plan to refer back to throughout design cycle

(Click on image to expand)

User flows

The system allows users to do the following tasks:

• Create and submit incident reports (both staff and admins)

• View repository of submitted/draft reports before they become cases

• View Case status as well as ability to append necessary files, and leave notes

• Reassign cases across admins

• Populate OSHA301/Worker Comps forms from the info on the report

• View case timeline of events and activity log

Flow for an admin creating a new case and processing OSHA forms. Exploring a potential “hint” system that could help a new admin during the case creation, etc.

Flow for an admin reviewing a newly submitted report (by staff) and assessing priority before opening a case.

Ideation + Iteration

Sketches

The next stage of the project involved ideation and coming up with the best page layout that prioritized the main functions, while allowing room for secondary features. The system would primarily be used on a desktop so a horizontal layout was considered. Sketching allowed me to explore alternatives, should new features needed to be added/or removed, and it was important to think about scalability since the same user experience should be applied whether the user was viewing/processing one case or 10+ cases.

Low-fi wireframes

The first iteration of the wireframes was shown to a group of stakeholders and fellow designers for feedback. The overall comments were positive, and praising the form design, and simplicity of the layout, while making the most of the horizontal screen real estate.

Design opportunities

  • The timeline that gets updated every time a new event occurs was not scalable, and needed to be reconsidered

  • The OSHA301/Workers Comp flow was not very clear when being filled out/submitted; OSHA300 form was not complete

  • Some buttons at the top bar were redundant, as the same functions could be done at the bottom of the page

Hi-fi wireframes

After making the changes from the first design critique session, it was time to implement the colors from our style guide. For my part of the project I was tasked with the form design, as well as the administrative view of the system, my partner took care of the dashboard, user settings and other secondary features and screens.

Annotation & handoff

The final version of the prototype includes all interaction for the main tasks, and has been updated after stakeholder comments to address previous design issues. There are more details in the design, including color images representing recorded footage and captured images, as well as recording and default device indicators in specific colors.

Reflection

Designing an incident reporting system for healthcare highlighted the importance of clarity, recovery, and scalability in high-stress workflows. Users need to move quickly, understand what’s required, and feel supported throughout the process.

This project strengthened my ability to design for multiple roles within a single system—balancing the needs of nursing staff submitting reports with administrators managing and prioritizing cases. It also reinforced the need to think at scale, ensuring the experience remains consistent and usable whether handling one case or many.

Reporting an incident shouldn’t feel as painful as the incident itself.