How hospitals began to anticipate flow instead of reacting to it.
Overview
Deciding where to admit a patient took an average of 22 minutes. The information was fragmented across several systems, so the bed coordinator had to check each one, call the emergency room, units, and nursing, and assemble a full picture manually. As a result, patients often waited in the hallway while beds sat open in other units. The gap was in visibility and coordination, not in physical capacity.
The mental model that systems ignored
We started with research to understand how bed coordinators work: in-depth interviews, field observation on night and weekend shifts, and co-creation sessions with clinical teams. They consistently reason across three dimensions at once, who is arriving, who is here now, and who will leave soon. The existing systems split these into separate tabs, which added navigation and cognitive load, so we designed
the interface around that three-part model instead of the
backend structure.
Designed for those working under pressure
The users work long shifts, often at night, and the interface was built around that. It uses dark mode to reduce visual fatigue and a functional color hierarchy, red for critical, yellow for caution, blue for projections. Information density is high but organized for scanning, with the key status at the top and detail one click away.
The drill-down follows the work itself, network → hospital → department → patient, showing the right level of detail at each step.
Specialized modules,
same logic
Beyond the central bed view, the PFCS included modules for telemetry, operating room, and team management, each following the same pattern of immediate context, accessible detail, and clear action. In the telemetry module, critical alerts and patients on devices past the ideal window were highlighted directly in the list, without opening each record.
Results
The average time to decide bed allocation went from 22 minutes to 4. The project received the IF Design Award 2021, the Red Dot Design Award 2021, and the Design For a Better World Award 2021, in the same year and for the same product.
The main takeaway was that hospital overcrowding, often treated as a capacity issue, was largely a visibility one. Showing coordinators the information they already needed made decisions faster, more consistent, and less reliant on calls and separate spreadsheets.
