Psychiatry
In 2019, Tempus launched a new business in Neurology and Psychiatry by offering pharmacogenomic testing, symptom tracking, and data aggregation to clinical psychiatrists. The goal was to help providers choose more targeted treatments for their patients based on a combination of real-world data and molecular profiling.
My Role:
I was the lead designer on this project for almost a year, taking responsibility for the visual and functional design across all related projects. In that time, I designed the PDF report, created a report generation process, and built an extensive conceptual demo to help sell the future product to new clients. I mentored a part-time design intern who helped explore animation techniques, and worked with a contract developer to bring the demo to life and build operational software.
D E M O 2 0 1 9
User problems:
There’s no established standard of care in psychiatry, so prescribing drugs is largely trial and error
I need help tracking and quantifying my patient’s progress
I don’t have visibility into other patients like mine
I want to know how patients are responding to certain drugs on a large scale
I want to identify genomic markers with potential for drug development, but this data doesn’t exist
U S E R R E S E A R C H
Since pharmacogenomics hasn’t yet been established as part of the standard of care in psychiatry, we had to rely heavily on internal experts (genetic counselors, variant scientists, and industry-leading psychiatrists) to provide scientific context about what our future users would need. I also worked closely with our sales and business leaders to get access to our first customers. This involved sitting in on demos and calls to document reactions and define the most impactful user problems.
U I S P O T L I G H T
Predictive symptom tracking | quantitative symptom tracking, and algorithmic predictions of how those symptoms would change with each treatment
Location insights | optional GPS integration to collect metrics on a patient’s activity levels
Customizable assessments | adjustable measurements for monitoring the most relevant patient symptoms
HealthKit integration | helpful quantitative metrics for gauging the severity of a patient’s disease
Response data | interactive dataset highlighting response rate per treatment
Subtyping | innovative data clustering designed to help users discover interesting or significant biomarkers
R E P O R T G E N E R A T I O N
In addition to designing the PDF report, we also needed an operational process for producing those reports that would bypass our existing oncology pipeline. I worked with a contract developer to build a custom sketch plugin that would create reports programmatically from a google sheets input, cutting our report creation time from 5 hours to 15 minutes.
M O L E C U L A R R E S U L T S
Pharmacogenomic testing helps clinicians understand how a patient will metabolize different types of drugs based on their genetics. This is crucial in choosing an appropriate dose and avoiding potentially harmful drugs.
Standard summary of patient, sample, and order details
Simple list of genes, chosen for their relevance to clinical psychiatry
Genotype and corresponding phenotype to describe a patient’s metabolizer status
Easy portal access with the ability to print and download (v2)
R E F E R E N C E I N F O R M A T I O N
The Reference Information section of our report supplements the molecular findings by outlining all of the corresponding treatment implications for a patient. This is reported separately since it’s essentially an aggregation of publicly-available research, curated to that specific patient’s molecular profile.
Classifications outlined into four categories with accessible definitions
Color coded iconography to lead a user through the report
Drugs under consideration are listed at the top
Drug class categories based on diagnosis
Subcategories organized by indication and linked to related evidence
O U T C O M E
When I joined this team in 2019, we didn’t have any customers yet, just some general interest from a few psychiatrists. By 2020, we had hundreds of active users viewing and downloading their results in the Tempus portal. In early 2020, we hired a new designer to support this product area full-time, and the team has since launched a symptom tracking app and accompanying web portal.