Making a difference for 50,000 nurses.
We started with a simple question "What do nurses really want from an app?".
The Ascension Nursing Center of Excellence (ANCoE) initiative was created to focus on the needs of nurses and take a fresh look at how they are being served by technology. Its mission was to make Ascension the best place to practice nursing.
Amy Wilson, Senior VP, Clinical Operations at Ascension, approached Athlon to create a new app for nurses to support them in their personal and professional lives.
To discover what nurses wanted, we conducted interviews and workshops across the country. We asked Ascension nurses to rate and rank app features based on importance and how frequently they'd use them. We lead workshops, asking nurses to group features and held roundtables to understand how they wanted technology to support them.
“We wanted to help nurses get easier access to information, remove friction and highlight the many career opportunities open to them so they can grow and flourish in nursing.” April Tinsely, VP,
Ascension Nursing Center of Excellence.
We were able to identify the most wanted features and organize the product plan, putting nurses' needs first. The success of the app depended on nurses finding the app intuitive, easy to use, and highly relevant to them.
“Designed by nurses for nurses” was a guiding principle throughout the design process, ensuring that nurses were involved in feature discovery, and design validation.
In the same spirit, we proposed that nurses should name the app.
In collaboration with the NCoE, we created a naming contest that collected over 1000 name submissions and after over 15,000 votes were cast, we had a winner, ‘OneNurse’.
To promote the launch, Athlon produced a short film to tell the story of the nurse-centered design and highlight key app features. Filmed and shot on location(s) in Tulsa, OK.
By looking into both the professional and private lives of nurses, we discovered the features that matter most.
Launch priorities
To establish OneNurse as a goto destination on nurses personal smart phones, we prioritized features that they would use regularly.
Intended for use on nurses personal phones, the app design references both the Ascension brand guidelines and the nurse-centric values of the Nursing Center of Excellence.
Topical news
Highly targeted news zoned to the topics and communities nurses care about.
Shift swaps
Finally a friction-free way for nurses to take back control of their free time and regain that much needed work-life balance.
Being a part of something
Nursing is a calling and often the desire to help people extends beyond the hospital walls. Channels is a space that celebrates the world of nursing through the stories posted by nurses for nurses.
One stop shop
OneNurse works hard under the bonnet to integrate many disparate systems to bring Pay, PTO and Benefits together in one place for nurses. Now technology does the running around!
Caring for the carers
Nurse burnout is all too common, so we placed Wellness Support in a popular section of the app to make it easy to find when nurses needed it most.
We invited Ascension nurses to help us find a name for the app and the response was amazing! We refined hundreds of entries to a shortlist and put the final decision back to the nurses.
A decisive 15,000 votes later, we had a winner!
Athlon delivered an exceptional app experience for nurses, removing friction and creating a platform that serves our core mission, to make Ascension the best place to practice nursing.
Next up:
A new Dimension for pro photographers.
