As Principal UX Designer, I led a team of researchers and designers to unify four distinct healthcare services into a single, cohesive digital experience across iOS and Android apps and web.
High-Level Overview:
At Providence Health & Services, a large multi-state healthcare organization, I led the unification of four separate patient services into one cohesive digital experience.
Leadership identified two primary objectives. First, reduce non-essential ER visits by making it easier for patients to access appropriate care options through one simplified entry point. Second, remain competitive in a rapidly evolving digital healthcare landscape, as consumer expectations were being reshaped by platforms like Zocdoc, Aetna Mobile, and Amazon Health.
The MVP was launched for Swedish Health, a recently acquired healthcare system within Providence. While each service retained its full clinical and operational capabilities, the challenge was to bring them together under one consistent user experience, while integrating with existing systems and meeting established performance benchmarks.
Key success metrics included matching or exceeding baseline KPIs, such as appointment completion rates, for each individual service.
Process:
1. Research
2. IA/UX
3. UI
RESEARCH: My team and I performed number of patient interviews and ’round robin’ sessions. We need to establish a baseline of what patients were looking for from healthcare services. Key learnings centered around time vs. money. “What do patients value more, time or money? Like most things in user experience, the answer is “It depends”. We did learn that we had to provide basic service information. For example, some patients didn’t know what a “virtual visit” was. Essentially a Zoom call with a doctor was fairly unheard of pre-Covid.
RESEARCH:
My team and I performed number of patient interviews and ’round robin’ sessions. We need to establish a baseline of what patients were looking for from healthcare services. Key learnings centered around time vs. money. “What do patients value more, time or money? Like most things in user experience, the answer is “It depends”. We did learn that we had to provide basic service information. For example, some patients didn’t know what a “virtual visit” was. Essentially a Zoom call with a doctor was fairly unheard of pre-Covid.
UX:
Staying in lo-fi wires as long as possible helped us to not get pigeon-holed into solutions. Especially with such complex requirements showing locations
Testing:
I between iterations, we were able to share lo-fi wires and prototypes with patients. These test kept us on the right track to iterating things like onboarding, account creation, and scheduling flows.
UI: I initiated a design system using Google’s Material design as a base. This reduced the number of variants we would need to plan for and greatly improved production velocity. Since the product was due to be white-labeled for future brands to adopt, this was a cornerstone of success.
RESULTS:
By my team departure in Aug 2018, my concept was well received by
team leadership and the CEO of Providence, Rod Hochman.
As this was a launch of a brand new product we had no existing KPIs to compete against. However, the experience proved successful by surpassing our initial goals. As of Aug 2018, our app downloads goal of 2,000 was surpassed at 6,750. Estimated appointments made within the app of 300, achieved a high of 447. The app which still uses the foundations I created has a 4.8 rating on the Apple App Store and a 4.7 rating on the Google Play Store.
