PeaceHealth Sponsored Capstone
As part of my UW iSchool capstone, my team worked with PeaceHealth and Sound Physicians, one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the Pacific Northwest. Dr. Keith, a hospitalist treating sepsis cases firsthand, brought us one of the hospital's most persistent problems: sepsis patients return at higher rates than almost any other condition, and the current system leaves critical gaps.
The objective was clear: build a post-discharge tool that helps patients catch early warning signs of infection, ultimately lowering sepsis readmission rates.
This project is currently in progress. The product is being finalized with features, moving towards clinical trials, and pursuing a patent.
Sepsis is one of the highest-readmission conditions in healthcare. 1 in 5 patients return within 30 days; within 90 days, that climbs to 1 in 3. Hospitals equip patients with everything they need to recover at home: a multi-page After Visit Summary, verbal instructions, and medication lists. The problem isn't access to information, it's retention. Patients say "yes, I understand" during discharge, but within minutes of walking out the door, they forget almost all of it. There's no system in place to reinforce that information once they're gone.
User quote: "I thought I understood everything at the hospital, but realized I was confused once I got home."
Sepsis recovery starts here. Tillage helps patients and their caregivers learn about key warning signs, assess daily risk levels, and detect possible recurrences early, replacing a stack of paper with an active, ongoing companion for recovery.
Yale School of Nursing, 2017
PMC10546999, 2023
PMC9482946, 2022
Research: competitive analysis
Each team member brainstormed individually before we converged, generating 40+ ideas. My ideas focused on reducing cognitive load during check-ins, extending support to caregivers, and reinforcing recovery through active engagement, all of which were directly informed by the research insights.
From the matrix, I sorted features into three tiers. Through iterative discussions with my team and Dr. Keith, I focused the P0 scope on daily risk assessment, education, and reminders, features that directly address the retention gap, cognitive load, and the lack of at-home monitoring identified in our research. I documented remaining features for future phases.
Since no direct competitors or reference patterns existed for post-discharge sepsis recovery, I started by setting ground rules — typography, color, spacing, breakpoints, and components. The design system provided the team with a single source of truth, ensuring every component remained consistent as the product scaled to hundreds of screens.
During early design, I came down with a severe fever and spent a week in and out of urgent care. The first few days, even ADLs (Activities of Daily Living) were a real struggle.
When the doctor walked me through recovery instructions, I followed everything in the moment. But afterward, it was very difficult to remember everything they said.
Within that state, I started thinking about design. I kept coming back to Hick's Law, which helped me see how simplicity in UI can make decisions easier, reducing cognitive load and boosting user confidence. I also made sure every piece of copy was plain and easy to understand on the first read, and designed every interaction to carry the lowest possible cognitive load.
With the design system in place, I aligned with my teammate on three foundational screens: onboarding, the daily check-in and risk assessment, and the dashboard.
From there, I moved into mid-fi to flush out every screen, transition, and edge case in between, getting the product ready for user testing.
I ran expert reviews with a UX content expert, a doctor, and a clinical performance nurse, then ran a first round of usability testing with sepsis survivors. Each reviewer brought a different lens, content clarity, clinical accuracy, and workflow fit, and together surfaced the feedback that drove the iterations below. Subsequent rounds of usability testing are ongoing.
"Users didn't know who the app was for or why to trust it."
validation: iterations
Further refinements
The original emergency screen lacked urgency; it used the app's green palette, which undermined its severity. I redesigned it in full red, with a clear hierarchy: what's happening, what to do, and a call button.
Space screens between sections
The continuous check-in flow drained users. I added labeled space screens to provide context before each section and to create a mental break between them.
Info buttons on sensitive questions
Questions like "What is your heart rate?" felt invasive without context. I added tooltips that explain why the question matters and how to measure it.
Settings restructure
One endless scrollable page made it hard to update specific information. I restructured it into three focused sub-pages: Personal Information, Medical Profile, and My Equipment.
challenges
Once the app collects symptom data such as fever, chills, and vitals, it's Protected Health Information. The app must be HIPAA-compliant before it can launch publicly. This is an ongoing workstream with lawyers and PeaceHealth's IRB.
Any study involving patient recruitment through PeaceHealth requires Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, a process that can take months for studies that handle Protected Health Information. Because this approval window extended beyond the capstone timeline, I couldn't recruit sepsis survivors directly through the hospital. I sourced participants independently through online sepsis survivor communities—the trade-off: a smaller, self-selected sample, but an earlier signal on the design.
With two developers and a compressed capstone timeline, I knew front-end work would be the bottleneck. So I designed with handoff in mind from the start, auto-layout on every frame, consistent spacing tokens, and proper component states, and introduced the team to Figma MCP to translate designs directly into code. The pipeline saved roughly three weeks of front-end work, let our engineers focus on the algorithm, authentication, and data handling, and let me contribute directly to the front end to keep design and code 1:1.
The core product is functional, with a few features still in progress and a second round of user testing underway for the hi-fi designs.
Several pieces are still being finalized before the public launch: HIPAA compliance work with PeaceHealth, final approval from the PeaceHealth team, the patent application my team is pursuing, and the hand-off for clinical testing.
This story is still being written.
If you'd like to know more about the design decisions, the moments that didn't make this case study, or where this project is headed — let's chat.