Perfecting the patient search & scheduling experience

Project TypeEnd to end product design for client's Practice Management System

My RoleLead Experience Designer

ContributionUser Interviews
Co-ideation Workshops
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Visual Design
Usability Testing
Stakeholder Management

ToolsFigma, Miro, Jira

Target UsersFront desk office staff
Doctors
Patient engagement centre staff

OutcomePilot 1 Released in 10+ Clinics

Duration18 Months

The Beginning

Back in Dec 2020 when I joined Globallogic Noida, I was given an opportunity to lead experience design for an ongoing project in healthcare domain. I was already very excited to jump start since it was my first project both in my new organisation as well as in healthcare domain. Healthcare has lot of potential opportunities which can be addressed by good design but owing to plethora of regulations around it, the design often gets a second seat at the table and considered after the regulations are taken care of. My never ending quest for exploration and solving problems through designs allowed me to add both business value in the project along with improved productivity of healthcare providers in their daily tasks.

About the Client

The client is a premier business partner for Optometry (OPH) and Ophthalmology (OPT) practices all around the United States, managing business operations, including IT, revenue cycle, purchasing, marketing, human resources, recruiting & training.

They team up with leading providers to deliver expert, compassionate and trusted vision care to families across the nation. In total, they have around 700 practices (550 in OPT and 150 in OPH) under their umbrella and on average they add 45 to 50 new practices per month.

Envisioning the Product Idea

The client has multiple software systems deployed in individual practices owing to multiple acquisitions over the years to address the practice management system (PMS) and electronic health record (EHR) needs of its optometry and ophthalmology practices. While established Optometry practices have migrated to their proprietary system, the Ophthalmology practices still use a variety of commercial systems that each practice has selected, acquired and configured over time.

While widely deployed across Optometry, the legacy system—while having many positive traits—was implemented using a previous-generation “on premises” software architecture and remote data collection/consolidation paradigm. This diversity of software systems within client ecosystem, combined with the “on premises” nature of the current legacy system, make it more difficult for client to act, respond and report as a single entity.

The goal of the new envisaged product is to enable the deployment of a single software system for all of client's practices that supports the full gamut of practice management and EHR needs for optometry and ophthalmology practices. This includes the entire lifecycle from Initial patient contact, Scheduling, check-in and information gathering; (near) real-time patient status tracking in the office; imaging, examination, diagnosis and treatment; retail, billing, and payment; through to check-out and the scheduling of follow-up visits. In other words, reimagine a modern, cloud-based, experience driven & scalable unified platform that caters to the needs of both optometry & ophthalmology practices.

My Role

As Experience Design Lead, my responsibility was to drive the user experience for a module "Scheduler" that allows front desk clerks to manage appointments for a patient including booking, rescheduling, patient management, check-in and check-out.

My team consisted of 2 Designers. I reported to the Design Director for GlobalLogic Design Studios in India and Program Manager for Project in St. Louis, Missouri. Along with that, I had to work very closely with User Researchers, Product Owners, Technical Architects, & Subject Matter Experts to ensure both business & user requirements are met within technical constraints.

Discovery

The project started with an 8 week discovery phase where we did conducted extensive interviews with physicians, their staff, and key stakeholders. A journey map was created for both Optometry & Ophthalmology function that helped me identify the commonalities and unique nuances of the workflows across each practice type. I continually engaged key stakeholders in dialogue and workshops to refine the journey maps to ensure an accurate and thorough understanding of the current state.

Across the entire engagement, pain points and opportunities were identified and captured in order to fuel the development of the product backlog and better understand how an all-in-one solution must support and enhance the client's practices. I started with going through the research artefacts to have an objective to:

Understand the challenge at hand and highlighting areas of impact
Combining inside -out and outside-in research to build a full picture of the drivers for change
Defining the approach that will lead us in designing the future solution
Leveraging the knowledge of the organization for research validation and creation of potential solutions

Current journey maps illustrate user activities and touch-points with pain-points identified at each step and its impact on people, business and experience.

Some key pain-points discovered:

Finding the patient is cumbersome & takes on average 6 clicks to landup on the right profile.
Too many search results to scan through.
No feature to support recent searches
Its difficult to decide the right amount of information to be shown at first level of search that conforms to HIPAA compliance.
Finding the available slots needs too much visual scanning on the canvas and cognitive load.
Accessibility was poor and inconsistent navigation across different screens.

Guiding Principles

The research insights led us to derive guiding principles that have become cornerstones of the ECP software processes of the future.

Collaboration

Individual tasks and group work are aligned, guided by a common objective, and supported by accessible and empowering instruments.

Reliability

We want to cultivate a sense of trust and certainty, providing objective and accurate information that people can depend on to make confident decisions.

Compliance

Adherence to vivid healthcare compliances at the core like HIPAA and ensuring the UI promotes that.

Ownership

We want to define in a clear and accessible way who is the owner for the tasks. We want to reduce inefficiencies and misunderstandings that could affect the workflow and the relationship with clients.

Define:
The Future Journey

Based on co-creation sessions with various process stakeholders & mapping areas of high priority, we developed Future Journey covering most of the scheduling & check-in process and addressing the pain points conveyed by users. The journeys were validated with stakeholders through multiple co-ideation workshops. The validated service blueprints were used as input for business process finalization & UX design.

Design:
IA and Task Flows

We conducted system demos and pre-design workshops to validate the process flows which were detailed out keeping the employee experience at the core. We created task-flows and conducted validation sessions to refine, validate, and finalize the user flows.

Scheduler Patterns Study

We conducted an activity within the team to observe & note the various available interaction models within the same landscape of related products. We analyzed the products which were benchmarked for certain features & then devised our interaction model to cater to our needs and scalable for evolving business requirements.

Scheduler module in AdvanceMD EMR

Scheduler module in NextGen EMR

Experience Drivers

Derived from our understanding of user behaviour and guiding principles - the five experience drivers define the user interactions, wire-flows and visual design language.

Cohesive

Creating consistency across platforms to increase familiarity & intuitiveness.

Guided

Keep users informed throughout all stages of every process, helping them make better decisions.

Flexible

The system should be customizable, adaptive and scalable to accommodate changes and the needs of different roles

Focused

Define the user flows in a sequential manner so that users can focus on a particular task at a given time.

Accessible

Designing for human diversity allowing all types of users to have a unified experience.

Interaction Model

On the basis of earlier study and the users requirements, a new interaction model was designed to empower front desk clerks to perform their tasks easily and efficiently. A consolidated set of views that can be displayed alone or contextually in tandem with each other.

Components

In order to ensure scalability and standardization across all modules, we created a design system consisting of guidelines and components, for easy hand-offs between teams using the atomic-design approach. Creating components help developers to start their work without waiting for individual screens. It ensures consistency and reusability to save time in design and development.

Wireframes

Using the experience drivers and IA we translated the user flows into seamless wireframe flows. We conducted recurring validation meetings with dev, business teams, subject matter experts & alpha users to validate the detail designs and finalizing the design solutions.

Visual Design

Inspired from brand design guidelines and aesthetic principles, the visual designs were prepared. With continuous feedbacks and workshops with end users, these were iterated and evolved for signoffs.