Summary
Government's digital products and services often impact millions of people. In this session, two team members from Coforma, a digital services firm supporting both commercial and federal government modernization efforts, will discuss how they navigate challenges and foster success in supporting one agency's effort to relieve over-burdened clinicians and improve patient care. At the center of their work is a suite of tools that enable the agency to advance equitable delivery of innovations in cancer treatment. Julie and Laureen will share their strategies for prioritization within a complex ecosystem of business owners, centering patients and clinicians through a strong UX/Product partnership, and leveraging roadmapping and user story mapping to define, focus, and clarify achievable MVP solutions.
Key Insights
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Federal healthcare software modernization must balance legacy systems and strict regulations while keeping clinicians’ workflows central.
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UX and product managers need tight alignment to move federally regulated products forward amid unpredictable political shifts.
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Multiple iterations of dynamic roadmaps allow teams to anticipate and pivot swiftly in response to new legislation or administrative priorities.
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User story mapping is a powerful planning tool to clarify MVP scope and prioritize features by the actual user journey, especially in complex, multi-stakeholder environments.
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In federal healthcare projects, different clinician roles (e.g., oncologists vs. pathologists) can have conflicting priorities requiring careful stakeholder management.
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Staying inside existing legacy electronic health record systems, rather than building standalone apps, helps maintain clinician workflow continuity and adoption.
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Collaborative creation of user story maps fosters team engagement, alignment, and shared understanding even in agile environments without formal requirements documents.
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Data privacy and security constraints demand careful research practices, such as disabling cameras during workflow demonstrations and avoiding cloud storage of PHI.
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Product teams in government often lack direct patient access, forcing reliance on clinician secondhand perspectives to understand patient experiences.
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The complexity and scrutiny of working with highly visible government stakeholders parallels challenging stakeholder dynamics in private sector but on a larger scale.
Notable Quotes
"We are public servants at heart, embedded into federal agencies to deliver software solutions that help make lives better."
"Healthcare IT is highly regulated, plagued by staff shortages, outdated documentation, and legacy systems decades old."
"Prioritizing across a complex ecosystem of business owners requires deep alignment between UX and product or the product never moves forward."
"We often have to rely on Google Newsfeeds to keep ourselves informed of legislative changes that affect our roadmap."
"User story mapping is a user-centered way to organize user stories based on a user’s journey, helping us define MVP scope."
"We decided to remain inside the legacy electronic health record system rather than build a new standalone app for lab result delivery."
"The user story map became a single source of truth for ongoing conversations, constantly evolving with shifting requirements."
"Developers were surprisingly excited to collaborate on the user story mapping exercise, showing it scratched an itch for them."
"We work very closely with our UX researchers; they’re often half a step ahead, informing product decisions with their findings."
"Clinicians have patient data we can’t access due to privacy, so we must rely on their insights instead of direct patient feedback."
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