Central Station UX
Alarm triage, patient matrix views, patient detail tabs, and real-time monitoring layouts for portrait displays.
Overview
I worked as a product designer within a highly technical, software-driven environment, contributing across UX, systems thinking, and data strategy to support enterprise-scale clinical monitoring.
The platform integrated wireless medical devices, central monitoring stations, and hospital workflows into a unified, vendor-neutral system. My role extended beyond interface design, operating across product definition, workflow architecture, and data interpretation, collaborating closely with engineers to translate complex system behaviors into usable clinical tools.
Design for Real-Time Clinical Environments
A major focus was the central monitoring station, an information-dense interface where clinicians continuously assess patient status, triage alarms, and make time-critical decisions.
- Alarm triage systems and patient matrix views
- Real-time monitoring layouts optimized for rapid scanning
- Patient detail interfaces supporting quick drill-down into context
Clinical Workflows
Assigning patients to rooms, pairing devices, handling alerts, and guiding clinicians through critical steps.
Data & Analytics
Research tools, device data reporting, alarm analytics, and concepts for more effective surveillance systems.
Complex Clinical Workflows
Beyond screens, I shaped end-to-end workflows that connected clinicians, patients, rooms, and medical devices.
- Guide clinicians through precise sequences (assign patient → connect device → confirm readiness)
- Reduce setup errors in high-pressure environments
- Make system state and next steps immediately clear
This work emphasized interaction design at the systems level, ensuring reliability, visibility, and trust in environments where mistakes carry real consequences.
Device assignment workflows
Assigning devices from bedside tablet or hub, incorporating wireless devices, pagers and monitors.
Vendor specific solutions
Existing systems needed to be evaluated and incorporated into daily workflows.
Alarm escalation
Smart alarms incorporating parameters from different devices allowed for more sophisticated alarm escalation.
Exploring surveillance patterns and responsive views
Concept work explored alternate ways to surface alarms, trends, and patient status, including denser patient grids, sparklines, and triage-focused layouts.
Design themes
- Show alarming patients without hiding broader context
- Sensitivity to alarm fatigue in hospital environment
- Make trends and abnormalities scannable at a glance
- Support drill-down from overview to patient detail
- Balance dense information with legibility and speed
Mobile Monitoring Concepts
- Demo how clinicians could review patient lists, inspect live measurements, view waveforms, and respond to alarm scenarios
- Analayze information hierarchy, readability, and the risks of mobile access in clinical environment
Alarm Fatigue & Operational Insights
Working in this space exposed a broader systems problem: alarm fatigue. Medical devices generate constant alerts, often without sufficient context, leading to cognitive overload for clinicians. I contributed to concept work that reframed alarms as an operational and data problem, exploring:
- Prioritization models for alerts
- Pattern detection across patients and units
- Analytics tools for hospital administrators to identify systemic issues
This involved not only interface design, but service design and informatics, and exploring how data flows across an entire hospital ecosystem.
Translating Raw Data into Usable Tools
Large volumes of medical device data needed to be accessible and actionable, and not buried in am EMR.
- Web-based research and reporting tools
- Time-based data exploration and export workflows
- Interfaces for navigating complex datasets across patients and devices
The challenge was not just visualization, but structuring data into workflows that non-technical users could understand and operate confidently.
Clinical Informatics dashboard
Concept development for new product highlighting how operational efficiences could be realized using real-time and aggregated data from dispararte sources.
Interactive marketing website
Website developed to market and sell the proposed informatics solution, showing typicsl reports and sign up for a demo.
Raw Medical device data
Research tools, device data reporting, alarm analytics, and concepts for more effective surveillance systems. This involved offloading large amounts of data to Matlab.
Outcomes
This work contributed to the design and improvement of clinical monitoring systems used in real hospital environments. It supported the integration of multiple medical devices into a unified, vendor-neutral platform, improving how clinicians monitor patients, manage alerts, and respond to changing conditions. Across projects, the work helped simplify complex workflows, improve visibility of system status, and reduce friction in high-stakes interactions.
Reflection
These projects reinforced that clarity is critical in clinical environments. Systems must communicate state, priority, and next steps without requiring interpretation, especially under time pressure.
It was strriking how much data medical devices generate, and how fragmented that data really is. Most devices were never designed to communicate with each other, yet hospitals depend on stitching them together into a functioning system. A significant part of the work became translating disconnected, high-volume data into something clinicians could actually use.
In my view, the regulatory environment, including FDA, 510(k), and quality systems, makes innovation difficult. Every change requires justification, documentation, and alignment with existing device categories. While this ensures safety, it also slows progress, especially compared to consumer technology and wearables, which are rapidly shaping expectations around access to personal health data.
One of the most critical challenges is alarm fatigue. Devices are designed to trigger alerts at any deviation, largely for liability reasons, but this creates overwhelming noise for clinicians. The opportunity and responsibility is to design systems that provide context, not just alerts. Data needs to be interpretable, prioritized, and connected across devices so clinicians can act with confidence, not hesitation.
The key takeaway: In clinical environments, good design is less about adding features and more about making complex systems understandable. That means reducing ambiguity, connecting fragmented data, and creating experiences that clinicians can trust in real time.
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Let’s work together
Available for product design, UX leadership, and complex systems work.
Contact Me