I worked at a company that provided online consultations with licensed practitioners. The practitioners were distributed across several fields: healthcare, mental health, finance and career counseling. The majority of the practitioners were in the primary care and mental health sector.
When a patient has a consultation, it’s required to have some type of record of the event. Each type of practitioner has a unique set of standards for their records.
There were primarily 2 tools used to conduct a consultation:
It was becoming impossible to manage all of the standards, undocumented processes and change management as the medical operation teams scaled.
The second tool was essential to the business and was unexpectedly acquired by a competitor, so it was a risk to continue using it.
Problems that I was more interested in:
The broader company goal was to stop using the external tool by merging all the necessary functionality into the Care Platform. The first feature to be ported over was the consultation note because it was core to the interaction between practitioners and patients.
The project started early 2022 and I led the design. I worked closely with my scrum team consisting of a tech lead, product manager and several software developers. There were a host of stakeholders from several of departments including product, engineering, clinical quality and medical.
When I started the research, my initial set of questions were centered around the general themes:
I performed research through attitudinal and behavioural methods with surveys, monitoring stats through logs, interviews and shadowing sessions.
I hosted frequent research and progress meetings with a rotating group of users because I had to speak to many different types:
The medical operations team was a complicated network of practitioners, logistics staff, team leads, clinical quality specialists and medical directors. The challenge was getting as many of the roles involved in the process while also creating channels to pass information.
The Episode page in the Care Platform represented a unique instance of care where the information about a consultation is stored.
There were 2 primary challenges:
The screenshots below show the original layouts for the episode page:
I hosted workshops with PMs, designers, engineers and practitioners to experiment with layouts. I continued to interview users to ask which parts of the interface were important over the journey of a consultation.
Low fidelity representations of the layout helped me adjust all the individual sections.
Most of the information in the left panel (Patient profile) was only important before the consultation, so I wanted to find better ways to use the space. I introduced a tab structure that allowed the practitioners to access all the information anytime.
In the old consultation view, the ‘Logistics’ section could be merged into the new feature, so I removed it to make the layout less cluttered.
Consultation notes required a significant part of the screen. Practitioners typically had half their monitors dedicated to the note, so I made rough guidelines for screen sizes from the research.
The high level steps for the feature were fairly easy to understand. Differences in workflows came up during the research, however they could be expressed in the content of the note.
The workflow started from the note list. This was the left panel in the episode screen that contained profile information. Several iterations were made to address various use cases.
There was also a significant opportunity to improve the content of the note. We made changes to each template by reframing questions, adjusting copywriting and introducing more intuitive UI components.
I designed the templates to fit in a narrower width so that more space could be dedicated to the video.
Adoption
New behavioural metrics
Reduction in templates
Processes standardized
The usage data was valuable because it served as a starting point for discovering opportunities to improve the feature moving forward. The reduction in templates and process standardization contributed to making the medical team more consistent with their operations.
There were several big challenges with the project:
There was pressure to deliver designs and implement them without speaking with users / medical staff. I spent significant effort convincing stakeholders that rushing into implementation only opens up the risk of building something that doesn’t fit the need.
I set up multiple channels and ways for the medical staff to express their needs and feedback in visible ways.
There was an assumption that design work is fully completed before engineering can begin working.
Engineering stakeholders believed that design and engineering work could not be done in parallel, so every moment design wasn’t fully completed was less time for engineers to build.
I worked with engineering leads to unblock the teams by showing the value of low fidelity designs, and how they were sufficient to unblock the engineers while giving design more time to work on refining solutions.
I frequently presented incremental progress to stakeholders in order to ensure the solution was directionally correct.
During the research phase, it felt like every person on the medical team had a different interpretation of what was necessary. The only way to move forward was to work with the medical team to figure out the accountability structure. I ended up working with many team leads because they had first hand experience while also having the authority to make process changes.
