Guidance AMS
A responsive cloud based application for antimicrobial approvals management and review used in major hospitals and healthcare facilities across Australia.
Joining the fight against antimicrobial resistance
About Antimicrobial Stewardship
The Stewards

Guidance MS – the legacy product
NCAS’s legacy product, Guidance MS was an integral tool for AMS activities in hospitals Australia-wide, but there were significant obstacles to growth and user satisfaction, including old technology & outdated GUI, problematic usability, an inability to cater for overhauled therapeutic workflows, new and advanced competitors entering the market, incomplete features and missing user goals.

Understanding User and Business Needs
I leveraged insights from existing customer research and feedback and delved further into user and business requirements:
Clarified User and Business Goals
Medical device compliance
As antimicrobials can cause serious harm if inappropriately issued, Guidance AMS was assessed as requiring the classification of software as a medical device.
Responsible for the Usability Engineering Standard (ISO 62366), I created our Usability Engineering Plan and oversaw compliance, ensuring at every stage of design and development we identified potential hazards within the UI, addressed these with design controls and conducted verification and validation accordingly.
UX Process
UX activities began with crystallising the overall site architecture and interaction, then dove deep in cycles for each primary module and feature.
Visual design
Approvals Module
Antimicrobial and indication workflows offer full decision support or appropriateness assessment based on available guideline support.
The form steps doctors through clinical questions about their patient, offering local and TGA resources for additional support, to issue approval types based on appropriateness and hospital drug restriction categories.
The module educates and directs doctors towards best practice, delivers insight into prescribing behaviour, helps identify patients in need of intervention and ultimately improves patient outcome and reduces hospital costs.
The existing module:
- Outdated and unclear UI
- Confusing UX leading to many dead ends
- Limitations to doctor issuing authority
- Lack of relevance between approval courses
- Too long to navigate these issues and obtain approval led to frustration and time wasted in a time-critical environment
How we improved it:
- Clearer and more comprehensive workflows
- Clean and intuitive UI
- Fast query flow and approval issue
- Increased flexibility and controls
- Clear, meaningful messaging
- Smart alerts management
- ID nomination for accountability
- And more!
User evaluation findings:
- Intuitive and speedy navigation (average 30 seconds to approval)
- Appreciated the speed and accessibility
- New UI – clean, fresh and clear
- Junior doctors especially valued decision support
- Minor UI updates for clarity of recommendations panel
- Minor content updates for workflows
Post Prescription Review Module
The PPR module helps AMS teams prepare and manage their ward rounds and review patients on antimicrobials in need of intervention.
Patients with antimicrobial therapies of potential concern are triaged from patient lists and added to AMS ward rounds. On the rounds (by desktop or physically in the wards) interventions are recorded in the review form.
Actionable recommendations are added to the patient history for doctors, and key measurable data from the reviews is saved for reports. An optional Acceptance Audit can also be conducted on rounds to capture how often doctors are acting on AMS recommendations.
The existing module:
- Convoluted and dense UI
- No ward round history
- Tunnel flow limiting user oversight of reviews in progress
- Limited filters for patient triage
- Not responsive making physical ward rounds paper dependent
How we improved it:
- A clean and intuitive UI
- High visibility on key tasks and statuses helping focus in time poor, distracting environment
- Clearly separated and easily accessible task areas
- Multiple spaces for different ward round types
- Ward round, review and audit statuses for better workload management
- Responsive for ward round annotation and reviews
User evaluation findings:
- Very different to the existing tool so some orientation required “It’s very different, but once you get it it’s really easy.“
- Fast, intuitive progress through workflows
- Liked ward round status indicators
- Appreciated strong colour messaging for key actions which helped them quickly identify statuses and items for attention
- Confusion over new concepts of ward round spaces vs ward rounds, but on refinement of presentation clarified successfully
- Liked the aesthetic – “Calm – very different to what I’m used to with (eMM) Epic.“
- Overall better ability to manage ward rounds
Patient Lists
The existing module:
- Dense and confusing UI
- Rudimentary triage details
- Full approvals details and history buried deep
- Limited control over lists with few filters
- Single patient list requiring repetition of search tasks to filter patients for every round
How we improved it:
- A clean and intuitive UI
- Configurable lists for regular rounds
- Powerful filtering tools
- Patient flags for alert statuses
- A concise summary view of items with key data for initial triage
- Rich content views for each patient enabling deep dive down through patient history
- All current admission patient data available on one screen
- Clear, quick and easy EMM approvals import
User evaluation findings:
- Appreciated ability to expand patient history quickly in one place
- New concept of custom lists required orientation but once understood AMS teams highly valued the ability to save filtered views for fast triaging
- Intuitive filtering and navigation
- Far fewer clicks to get to find patients than in old module
- Some lack of obvious connection between lists and rounds, but once visual messaging addressed immediately created meaningful links
Smart Alerts Management
Improving prescription relevancy
One of the major improvements we made to the new Guidance platform was to improve the breadth, accuracy and meaningfulness of approvals alerts which are critical to providing relevancy in prescription histories.
Connecting the dots
Better antimicrobial management
This is especially key to ensuring accurate reporting, as by helping prescribers to connect therapeutic courses it gives AMS teams a truer picture of patients’ antimicrobial management, and therefore better insight into antimicrobial efficacy.