Northwestern Ophthalmology
ClinicFlow Beacon
year
2026
duration
3 months
role
Research
Prototype
UIUX
TEAM
6 members
OVERVIEW
As part of a cross-disciplinary team of six spanning medicine, engineering, business, and law spent a quarter embedded in the ophthalmology space. From clinical shadowing and stakeholder interviews to market sizing, business model development, and a final investor pitch, we worked through the full lifecycle of a medical startup, grounding every decision in real clinical need.
Our final product, ClinicFlow Beacon, is a workflow intelligence platform designed for high-volume retina clinics. Integrated with Epic, it gives care teams a real-time view of each patient's progress through their visit, flags emerging bottlenecks, and surfaces recommended actions to keep the clinic moving. The result is a smarter, more coordinated clinic day for staff and shorter wait times for patients.
RESEARCH
A single intravitreal injection visit spans 9 phases, 4 stakeholders, and up to 5 room changes. Status updates rely on manual room flag changes and Epic color dots, leaving little shared visibility across the care team.
CURRENT PAINPOINTS
Ophthalmology clinics are among the most operationally complex outpatient environments in medicine, yet the tools used to manage them have barely kept pace. Through firsthand clinical observation and interviews with clinicians and patients, our team discovered that no person or system truly owned clinic flow—leaving high-volume retina practices reliant on manual workarounds and fragmented coordination. The consequences were real: compounding delays, clinician burnout, and patients who couldn't access care that the clinic had the physical capacity to provide.
STAKEHOLDER NEEDS
Across the workflow, we identified three key stakeholders: the clinic, clinicians, and patients. Each carries distinct needs as shown in the venn diagram. The intersection of these stakeholder needs is what we are designing for.
COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE
Existing platforms each solve a piece of the puzzle, but none combine outpatient focus, live operational visibility, predictive AI, and workflow automation in one place.
SOLUTION
Our research directly informed how we designed ClinicFlow Beacon.
The platform pulls timestamp data from Epic, collected as providers badge in and out at the start and end of each procedure. That data is then translated into a visually driven dashboard, giving the care team a clear, real-time picture of where every patient is in their visit without adding any new documentation burden.
PRODUCT IMPACT
Here is how we will unlock value for our customers. Picture a typical retina clinic. 50 patients a day per physician. Each visit taking about 2 hours or so. With our product, providers can be more efficient, push higher throughput, and be more effectively compensated. Saving just a few minutes per patient, and seeing just a few more patients per clinic day, can potentially unlock 70,000 in additional revenue per physician annually.
MARKET SIZE
We plan to deploy ClinicFlow Beacon where the need is greatest first. Multi-provider retina clinics, with their high volumes and complex multi-step workflows, represent our beachhead market.
From there, the platform is positioned to expand across broader ophthalmology clinics and eventually scale to outpatient specialties across medicine.
NEXT STEPS
Pilot at Northwestern Retina Clinic
Deploy ClinicFlow Beacon in a live clinical setting to validate performance, measure impact on throughput, and refine the platform based on real-world feedback.
Wait Time Transparency for Patients
Extend visibility beyond the care team by integrating live wait time estimates and procedure updates into the patient-facing clinic app and waiting room screens.
