eMAR Medication Management
Reducing friction in a safety-critical medication workflow Medication administration is one of the most frequent and high-stakes workflows for nurses in senior living and skilled nursing facilities. The challenge was to make the experience faster and easier to navigate without compromising the clinical information nurses need to administer medications safely.
Understanding the workflow
Rather than treating eMAR as a collection of screens, I looked at the nurse’s medication pass as an end-to-end workflow: finding residents and medications, reviewing instructions, documenting administration, handling exceptions, and moving quickly to the next task.
Research and usability sessions with nurses helped surface recurring friction around information density, navigation, finding medications, and repetitive interactions during a medication pass.
Design approach
The redesign focused on reducing cognitive and interaction overhead while keeping critical clinical information accessible.
I explored:
Day and monthly views to support different medication-management tasks
Search and sorting to find medications faster
Clearer hierarchy between medication information and actions
A sticky action area to reduce unnecessary movement through long medication lists
More consistent documentation and administration patterns
Better handling of clinical details and exceptions
A key principle was not to optimize purely for fewer clicks. In a clinical workflow, an additional confirmation can sometimes be valuable. I focused instead on removing interactions that added effort without adding safety.
Outcome
The redesigned workflow reduced time spent navigating and documenting medication administration, contributing to approximately 20 minutes returned to caregivers during their day.
More importantly, the project demonstrated how workflow efficiency and clinical safety can be designed together rather than treated as competing goals.