Bringing clarity to the clinical ward
Clinical sample collection runs on stressed nurses, tight schedules, and zero room for error — yet the process lived on memory and improvisation.
Tracie — a joint venture between Greiner Bio-One and Bridgemaker — is a web app that guides nurses through the entire collection round, from planning to the last tube logged.
I joined during the MVP and became sole Product Designer when the startup team was founded. During my time, 6 hospitals and clinics across Europe adopted the product.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Platforms
Web App
YEAR
2024
Team
1 PM
2 Designers
5+ Engineers
The Challenge
Nurses walked into their round blind — no overview of patients, samples, or timing before stepping onto the ward.
Everything lived in their heads — one interruption, and the round had to be reconstructed from memory.
Zero tolerance for error — a mixed-up tube means a re-draw for the patient and invalid data for the trial.
Impact
Adoption
6 hospitals and clinics across Europe during my time on the product.
The Approach
1. Give the round a home
Nurses were hand-writing patient names on tubes before leaving the ward — they were already planning, just without us. The worklist turned that habit into the product's spine: select patients, see every sample, walk the round once.
2. Ask, don't assume
When a patient has orders from other hospital stations, Tracie offers to combine them into one draw — but always asks. The nurse knows what tubes she's carrying; the system doesn't.
3. Follow the tube, not the ward
The sample's journey doesn't end at the bedside, so neither does Tracie — we designed the lab side too: order tracking, sample status, and a master-data dashboard.z
Looking back
The worklist taught me the best features aren't invented — they're discovered in users' workarounds, waiting for someone to give them a home. Since then, the first thing I look for isn't what users say they need, but what they've already built themselves.