The Interface Redesign That Will Save Lives
UX research and service design for the TRAC2ES Patient Movement Request Refresh — a redesign of the DoD system that tracks and coordinates military patient transport worldwide, praised by the USTRANSCOM Surgeon General for its impact on patient safety.
“I believe this will save lives.”
— Clinical staff interviewee, during the PMR Refresh UX research process
When a form is a matter of life and death
TRAC2ES — the Transportation Command Regulating and Command and Control Evacuation System — is the DoD platform that coordinates military patient movement worldwide. When a service member is injured and needs to be transported for care, TRAC2ES is the system that manages it. The Patient Movement Request (PMR) is the form at the heart of that process: it captures the patient information, medical requirements, and logistical constraints that determine how, when, and where a patient can be moved.
But the existing PMR interface had grown complex and inconsistent over time. Critical patient safety data was scattered across the form. Manual data entry created errors that slowed the validation process. The system served its purpose — but it wasn't serving its users well enough for the stakes involved.
DoD sought a unified, end-to-end service delivery redesign that could serve an ecosystem of stakeholders with fundamentally different needs and perspectives — from bedside clinicians to logistics coordinators to program administrators.
Design a system where the patient and their condition dictates every requirement of the move — and where the interface makes it structurally impossible to miss information that could determine whether someone lives or dies.
Serve users across four distinct stakeholder layers
Reduce manual entry and validation error simultaneously
Improve 'time to move' without sacrificing data quality
Restructure legacy data for metrics and logistics planning
UX Strategist, Researcher, and Service Designer
My work on the PMR Refresh spanned the full design process — from ecosystem research and user interviews through interface design and data architecture decisions. The goal was not just a modernized look and feel, but a redesigned service that improved business processes, patient outcomes, and program reporting.
Stakeholder & Ecosystem Research
Led the breakdown of the current service flow and mapped the full ecosystem of stakeholders — from front-line clinical users to program managers and DoD leadership — to identify interdependencies, pain points, and opportunities for redesign.
UX Research & User Interviews
Selected representative users from each layer of the ecosystem map and conducted structured interviews to ensure the new interface requirements were accurate, comprehensive, and addressed pain points for both day-to-day users and the broader organization.
Interface & Service Design
Designed the redesigned Patient Movement Request interface — integrating all touchpoints into a single UI, applying Material Design standards, implementing conditional display logic, and restructuring critical patient safety data to reduce error and improve outcomes.
Re-centering the system around the patient
The existing system had been built around administrative and logistical processes. Our research showed it needed to be re-centered around the patient — with every layer of the ecosystem organized around what the patient's condition requires for a safe, appropriate move.
The ecosystem model we developed structured the system across four concentric layers — patient, condition and treatment needs, movement logistics, and program metrics — each with a clearly defined purpose and boundary. This model became the architectural foundation for every interface and workflow decision.
Research-grounded, patient-centered, end-to-end
Service Flow Deconstruction
We started by breaking down the existing PMR process end-to-end — not just the interface, but the full service delivery ecosystem. This revealed that the system needed to be re-centered around the patient, not around administrative convenience.
Ecosystem Mapping
Created a comprehensive ecosystem map showing the interdependencies across all stakeholder layers: the patient at the center, surrounded by condition and treatment needs, movement logistics, and program metrics. This map drove every subsequent design decision and ensured we were solving the right problem at each layer.
Representative User Interviews
Conducted interviews with users from each layer of the ecosystem — clinical staff, movement coordinators, program managers, and registry administrators. This ensured the new interface requirements were grounded in real workflows, not assumed ones, and that pain points were addressed across all user types.
Error & Opportunity Analysis
Analyzed interviews and deconstructed the PMR process to identify areas for potential errors, extraneous data fields, and opportunities to enhance user experience, patient safety, and program impact. This analysis directly informed the interface's information architecture and interaction design.
Interface Design & Data Architecture
Designed the consolidated PMR interface — integrating all touchpoints into a single UI with automated data pulls replacing manual entry, conditional display and formatting to reduce cognitive load, and a restructured information hierarchy that prioritized life-or-death patient data above all else.
Where the design choices actually mattered
Life-Critical Data Consolidation
Transport restrictions and life-or-death dependencies had been scattered across the PMR form — increasing the likelihood that critical patient care information would be overlooked.
Reprioritized and consolidated all life-critical data into a single high-priority section at the top of the form, making it impossible to miss. This single decision was cited by clinicians as the most impactful safety improvement in the redesign.
Automated Data Verification
Manual data entry across the form was slow, error-prone, and created significant churn in the validation process — increasing 'time to move' for patients who needed rapid transport.
Integrated automated data pulls from connected DoD systems to replace manual entry wherever possible, using conditional display to show only fields relevant to each specific move type — reducing screens, errors, and cognitive load simultaneously.
STARTC Move Template
STARTC moves (a specialized category of patient movements) had unique requirements that the generic PMR form handled poorly, creating inefficiency and inconsistency for this user group.
Designed the first dedicated STARTC move template — a scaled-down, purpose-built form that served their specific needs efficiently without requiring adaptation of the full PMR system.
Metrics-Optimized Data Capture
Existing data fields were arbitrary in format and structure, limiting the quality of outcome metrics and making it difficult to identify patterns in patient movements for logistics planning.
Collaborated with the AE Registry and clinicians to redesign data fields for maximum usability in metrics reporting — more specific data in less arbitrary formats, with long-term use for prepopulated movement templates in mind.
UX strategy as a clinical outcome
All PMR touchpoints integrated into one streamlined interface
Automated data pulls replaced manual entry, reducing validation churn
Life-critical transport restrictions and dependencies consolidated into a single priority section
Metrics-optimized fields enable movement pattern analysis and prepopulated templates
Applying user experience strategy and service design to the PMR Refresh went beyond a modernized interface. Business processes, patient experiences and outcomes, program monitoring and reporting — all stand to benefit from the user-centered approach the team took.
“I believe this will save lives.”
— Clinical staff interviewee during the UX research process
The redesign was further recognized by the USTRANSCOM Surgeon General for its direct impact on patient care — an unusual distinction for a UX engagement, and a reminder of what's at stake when design is done well in high-consequence systems.
What this work reinforced
TRAC2ES reinforced something I carry into every project involving high-stakes systems: the most important design decisions are often invisible to the end user. Nobody praises an information hierarchy. Nobody notices that critical fields appear at the top of a form. But those decisions — made quietly, during research and synthesis — are what the clinical staff interviewee was describing when she said it would save lives.
The ecosystem mapping work was particularly instructive. Without it, we would have designed a better form. With it, we redesigned a service — one where every layer of the system was organized to serve the patient at the center, not the administrative process that had grown up around them.
This is what human-centered design means in practice in a defense context: not making things pretty, but making things work in a way that reduces error at the moment when error has the highest possible cost.
Manufacturing USA
National brand identity for a presidential initiative