Unicare
Designing a healthcare ecosystem for Canada's most pressing crisis.
Team
Me (Product designer)
Alex Manu (Professor)
Skills / Tools
Figma
User research
Design systems
Lucidchart
Timeline
Jan - Apr 2023
A system failing from every angle
One ecosystem, three products
Instead of a single tool for a single user, I designed an interconnected platform. A patient portal, a bedside decision-support app, and a management dashboard, all pulling from the same data backbone. Improvement in one creates relief across all three.
How the three products connect across patients, healthcare workers, and hospital management.
A co-pilot for healthcare workers
The research pointed consistently to team-based care: distribute tasks by skill, not hierarchy. I built the bedside app around a daily huddle, workers assign roles at shift start, then get AI-powered guidance throughout. Every recommendation surfaces its reasoning so clinical autonomy stays intact.
Voice assist handles the reality that healthcare workers' hands are rarely free.
Home screen surfaces alerts, role assignments, patient load, and team status at a glance.
Give patients the context to stop using the ER as a first resort
Patients weren't misusing the ER out of laziness, they had no other way to understand what was happening with their health. The patient portal gives them records, connected device data, appointment context, and a self-triage flow: describe symptoms, answer targeted questions, get a recommended course of action.
Self-triage walks patients from symptoms to a recommended care pathway.
Turn trapped hospital data into shared intelligence
The most striking finding from the research: when a hospital solves a hard problem, that knowledge stays local. No national system exists to share it. The admin dashboard surfaces real-time team efficiency, but it also enables de-identified data brokerage — hospitals anonymize operational data and share or sell it to research organizations.
Selected as an ACIDO Rocket finalist from hundreds of Industrial Design students in Ontario. Nominated by my thesis professor, Alex Manu.
Three prototyped products validated across five stakeholder groups through card sorting, empathy mapping, value proposition canvases, and subject matter expert review.
Metrics I'd track post-launch: ER misuse rates, healthcare worker burnout scores via Bradford Factor, patient health comprehension satisfaction, and revenue from de-identified data brokerage.
Next steps: feasibility testing, design system, coded MVP, hospital partnership for on-site iteration.