ICU Medical LifeShield Suite

Outcome

I led design on the platform built to replace MedNet IV, ICU Medical's older medication safety software. Five connected applications let hospitals manage fleets of networked infusion pumps from one place. It reached limited market release in July 2019, built on one shared pattern system and a living style guide for its engineers.

Connected applications on one platform

Pump families in one fleet view

Task scenarios in the first human factors study

The Problem:

MedNet IV was being replaced by a cloud platform of five applications, each for a different hospital team. Biomeds manage the pump fleet. Pharmacists build the drug libraries the pumps run on. Clinicians watch running infusions. Hospital IT controls who gets in.

Five applications could easily have felt like five products. And this was FDA-regulated medical device software: a confusing screen here isn't an annoyance, it's a safety issue.

Challenge:

• One platform, five jobs.

• Every screen ready for human factors testing.

• One way to build it, everywhere.

Who I Designed For:

• Biomeds (biomedical engineers and technicians): keep pumps configured, updated and repaired across facilities.

• Pharmacists and pharmacy technicians: build and publish the drug libraries pumps use for IV medication.

• Clinicians: near-real-time and historical reporting on running infusions.

• Hospital IT administrators: user accounts and access.

My Role:

• Lead designer on a four-person design team: a junior designer, a mid-level designer and a UX researcher, all of whom I mentored.

• Worked closely with the UX architect, who owned final design decisions.

• My work touched all five applications. In the first two years, before the full development team was in place, I also wrote front-end code. I worked with product, engineering, QA and regulatory so designs met validation requirements.

What I did:

• Mapped the suite

  • Built a sitemap of every application and user role, so five applications shared one navigation model.

• Designed fleet management (Asset Lifecycle Management)

  • Device dashboard: network, operational and power status, active alarms, malfunctions and update progress at a glance. Every widget opens a pre-filtered device list.

  • Device list: show and hide columns, stacked filters, live search, saved views and export. A details pane shows alarm status, location and asset ID.

  • Update scheduling: target pumps by device type, facility and software version, then track each one through scheduled, downloading, installing, complete, failed or refused.

• Designed clinical reporting (Infusion Management)

  • Clinical dashboard and Active Infusions: running programs, no-limit medications, overrides, alerts and pump alarms, using the same filter and column patterns as the device list.

• Made it consistent and buildable

  • Came up with the actions panel and details pane, two of the three shared patterns used across the suite (the third is the report table).

  • Designed and helped code a living style guide in Angular for front-end engineers: color, type, base elements, shared patterns and per-application layouts.

  • Designed responsive layouts from wall displays to tablets and phones.

  • Helped map user needs and workflows, and build the 12 task scenarios, for the first human factors formative study.
    

Impact:

LifeShield reached limited market release in July 2019, the month I left, so I don't have adoption numbers to show. What I can show is what it stands on: one pattern system across five applications, a style guide engineers built from, and core workflows tested in a human factors formative study before release.

• What this reinforced for me

  • In regulated software, human factors testing is the design review that counts.

  • Shared patterns are a safety feature: one way to filter, one way to act, everywhere.

  • Fleet tools start from the exceptions (alarms, malfunctions, failed updates), not the happy path.

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