In my role as a Senior Product Designer at Thirty Madison, my primary focus was strategy and design for the Care App, which serves as the central platform for all patient interactions, encompassing tasks such as messaging, addressing patient inquiries, and facilitating ongoing treatment. My chief goal for the Care App was to establish an environment that enables providers to efficiently review large amounts of clinical data while ensuring the delivery of an optimal patient experience.
As the sole product designer on the Care Tech team, I collaborated closely with every team involved in the project. The teams I worked most closely with were:
Our Users: Providers & Clinical Care Team
To identify opportunities for enhancing the Care App's treatment experience, I conducted frequent feedback sessions and usability testing with providers, RNs, and care coordinators. Their input informed how requested updates ranked on an impact scale and provided feedback as designs evolved.
Product Managers
My collaboration with the Product Managers was integral. Leveraging insights from the clinical care team, we identified critical areas for efficiency improvement and prioritized enhancements among our broader project and objective landscape. I worked closely with PMs to gather and inform requirements, make strategic decisions, identify KPIs and collect feedback.
Engineering
I made it a practice to engage with our engineering partners early in the design process, seeking feedback on designs during their low-fidelity wireframe stage and continuously as designs evolved and solidified. My collaboration with engineers spanned the entire design process, from contributing to ticket creation in the initial stages to conducting design QA for developed features.
Clinical Operations Team
The contributions of our clinical operations team were indispensable in shaping the processes and clinical standards that providers and the care team would follow within the Care App. I generated documentation and artifacts detailing platform changes and their usage, collaborating closely with the clinical operations team to introduce new features and disseminate information to providers.
In my role, I commenced the project by conducting usability sessions with providers to gain insights into their existing workflows and to better understand their thought process when creating treatment plans for patients. These sessions aimed to familiarize ourselves with clinical mental models and uncover pain points related to their experience with the platform. Additionally, I administered a concise survey to current users to better grasp their primary frustration.
It became evident that our platform, originally designed for addressing men's hair loss, was primarily commerce-focused. It needed a significant shift towards aligning with the clinical mindset of healthcare providers and accommode the treatment of high-acuity conditions, in line with our company's evolving objectives.
Problems to solve: Providers were spending excessive time navigating through multiple sections of the patient case file to gather necessary information needed to complete patient encounters. Furthermore, the current prescription experience did not align with the typical thought process of doctors when creating treatment plans.
With a compiled list of necessary improvements, I collaborated with our clinical team members to prioritize them based on their potential impact during patient encounters. These priorities were mapped on an impact scale, while I also worked closely with engineering managers to gauge the effort required for each improvement to identify where we could make quick and sustainable impacts.
Two primary considerations guided my design approach for the Care App: wayfinding and alignment with the clinical mental models of providers.
To kick off the design process, I developed low-fidelity designs, informed by design stories created in collaboration with the product management team.
Throughout the review of these low-fidelity wireframes, I sought input from engineering to ensure feasibility and consulted clinical leads about initial high-level functionality.
Subsequently, I transitioned to crafting final designs. For this project, I chose to begin by designing an ideal state encompassing identified improvements and informing north-star objectives. This approach allowed for collaboration with the product management and engineering teams to break the project into manageable segments while delivering an MVP version of the ideal state.
Two major design updates emerged:
Global Sidebar
I introduced a dedicated area within the patient case file, serving as a "snapshot" of critical information accessible to providers at any point during a patient encounter, regardless of the tab or position on the page. The sidebar was organized to align with the order of information sought by providers during encounters:
Prescribing Experience
Understanding that providers follow a specific process when treating patients, I revamped the prescribing experience to match the mental models of providers handling multiple high-acuity conditions. The new design allowed providers to formulate and adapt treatment plans efficiently, recording changes for future encounters.
The north-star designs underwent multiple iterations throughout the process, incorporating feedback from clinical stakeholders.
Once the designs were finalized, I contributed to the creation of engineering tickets by adding UI functionality details. During development, I participated in frequent engineering check-ins and conducted timely design QA.
I prepared informational documentation for user distribution during feature releases and collaborated with clinical operations on user processes, as well as organizing user feedback and Q&A sessions.
"It must be a challenge to try to put yourself in the mindset of a physician with regards to the entirety of clinical evaluation and decision making. Emily, I'm impressed with your ability follow it all and critically think/problem solve around it." - Clinical Lead
I prepared informational documentation for user distribution during feature releases and collaborated with clinical operations on user processes, as well as organizing user feedback and Q&A sessions.
As of the time of writing, the global sidebar has been fully developed, released to users, and has received positive feedback. The updates to the treatment plan experience are currently in development. These enhancements are expected to streamline the most common and complex processes performed by providers and care team members on a daily basis.
The ability to have a single source for clinical data without having to scroll through previous encounters has saved on average a minute per encounter. Although that may seem like a small amount of time, providers see on average 150-200 patients per day, saving them hours of work and signifcantly reducing the the risk of missing important clinical information.
“This is the beginning of a very important shift in how clinically relevant data is surfaced and then utilized by providers. It will be helpful and useful and not extra.” - Clinical Lead on Global Sidebar