CarePlus

Web Application

Team: iVedha
My role: Product design

CarePlus is a consumer-centric digital healthcare application that allows people to access quality proactive healthcare services when and where they need it. This application offers a range of benefits for both patients and healthcare providers, especially in telehealthcare, using virtual consultation.

Background information

The Client approached us about a healthcare project they needed building a solution for. They wanted to create an ecosystem of primary care clinics and leverage technology to improve patients’ experience when managing their healthcare or visiting their doctors. They started planning their project in 2019. We started working with them at the end of 2019 beginning of 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic started during the early phase of our design process. As existing clinics and healthcare adapted to the new situation. This helped us validate the concept and made it easier to gather information around remote healthcare.

In this case study, I will focus on the Patient's scope - what their frustrations and motivations are, then the process that we approached to give the solutions for their problems.

Problem

The current healthcare system is an outdated process with many inefficiencies.

1. Care providers rely on old EMR systems that force them to use manual processes to manage and transfer patient information.
2. Patients endure longer wait times for care and test results.
3. Patients lack ease of access to their health records.

Goal

1. To digital transform the current healthcare system to become the new standard of healthcare.
2. To build a platform that patients and care providers can simply connect.
3. To build a platform that is simple enough to be used by everyone.

...

Research Goals & Methodologies

Market

The client decided to build and release this product in North America, mainly focus on The US and Canada users. At the end of the day, the number of people who care much about the health of themselves and their family members keeps on rising. Though each person has a different situation, the issue they face is alike which is booking and getting into the appointment with the care providers.

Research goals

• To get the users' age range and who cares about the virtual healthcare service.
• To understand the pain points of the current healthcare system.
• To understand how current people book an appointment with their doctors.
• To understand how and if people track their health.

Competitive analysis

To collect data about products in the marketplace, we started creating a competitive analysis to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of products as well as identify possible user types.

User survey

We deployed a user survey that consists of 15 questions and uploaded it to some groups on Facebook & LinkedIn.

Some research questions asked to users:

1. How do you book an appointment with your doctor?
2. Do you face any challenges when booking an appointment with your doctor or when visit your doctor?
3. What tasks are you involved in when it comes to the healthcare of your dependents?
4. Based on your experience with the current healthcare system and your doctor/clinic, what do you think could be improved?

70 people had joined and completed the survey that gently provided us the quantitative data needed.

Key metrics

1. People who join the survey in the age range of 22 to 72, both male and female. Most of them have a family doctor.
2. 41% of people have been concerned about their health issues.
3. 82% of people have visited doctors less than 5 times per year.
4. 100% of people book an appointment with their doctors by phone call. Nearly 50% of them are frustrated about the waiting time during the booking process or visiting the doctors on the appointment date.
5. 52% of people manage their dependents' health. Most of them are parents in their '30s and need to manage the health of their kids. Some people need to take care of the health of their parents, spouse, and siblings. The number of tasks they usually involve in is booking appointments, taking their dependents to the appointment, being aware of their dependents' health, and making the decision if needed.

Scope

Target users: People aging 22 - 40 years old are tech-savvy and numerous elderly persons, 50 - 70 years old, want to simply connect to doctors via virtual call.

User personas

Potential users interview

We have selected some people who have a similar background with the user personas to conduct the interview then to understand their pain points as well as their motivations related to the health tracking.

Some interview questions asked to users:

1. In the last 2 years, have you had a remote consultation with your doctor? How did you book this appointment? On the day of the appointment, how did the doctor contact you? Do you feel the experience is the same as when you would go in to see your doctor in person?
2. When you feel unwell or become aware of an issue related to your health, what is your first course of action?
3. Do you keep copies of your and/or your family's medical records? How do you store them?

Key insights:

1. Doctors will primarily contact their patients by phone for a remote appointment. Possible reasons are the cost of virtual solutions and issues around adopting a new system.
2. Most people felt that the convenience of a virtual appointment may remove frustrations associated with visiting a doctor but also created new challenges such as difficulty explaining their concerns to the doctor.
3. Most people will seek out advice before booking an appointment with a doctor. Family members are consulted and trusted more than google searches.
4. Most people don't want to keep copies of their medical records in the paper but want to keep them online.

Define problems

1. People don't know the doctor's schedule so they can't check the doctor's availabilities when they need to book an appointment that fits the patient's schedule.
2. People spent a lot of time in the whole process of visiting their doctor in person.
3. People want to keep track of their health records, but most don't because it's not easy.
4. People managing their family members' healthcare face similar problems as 1,2,3 above.

Design solutions

1. Provide an easy way to view the doctor's schedule/availability.
2. Give patient options for different appointment types - virtual, phone, in-person - that suit their need.
3. Give the patient ability to easily view and manage their medical health records.
4. Give the patient ability to easily manage the healthcare of dependents as well.

Ideation & Validation

Affinity map

To organize and analyze research findings collected from the user survey and user interviews in the previous steps, we chose affinity mapping. By using FigJam - a new feature of Figma - we quickly organized the notes to get the ideas about product' categories as well as be able to determine the key features for the product.

Findings

After card sorting, we concluded there are several features we need to include: Booking Appointment, Managing Documents, Healthcare Resources, and Health Passport.

1. There are numerous challenges for patients when it comes to schedule an appointment or visit a doctor in person. To solve this we created a simple online appointment booking system that displaying doctor's availability, and provides 3 different appointment types that allow the care providers to offer the length of appointments.


2. Based on patients' concerns about the test results & medical records, we provide them the ability to access the documents so they can simply view their health information.


3. Based on the feedback about symptoms resources and healthcare tracking that provides us the opportunity to include healthcare resources as a nice-to-have feature for the app.


4. Lastly, based on the patients' needs about the convenience to access the healthcare system, we created the Health Passport feature to securely store and allow patients to easily access all their health information when they need it.

Customer journey map

Next, we used the Customer Journey Map to visualize the booking appointment process of the patient, also identify the opportunities to improve their experience on this flow.

The journey map above points out several clear points where Jane's expectations weren't met, and from that, we were able to give out the opportunities to solve those problems.

1. #1, 2 - Get rid of waiting time during the booking appointment and provide users an easier way to select available dates & times by giving them the ability to check the doctor's availability according to appointment types (Audio/Video/In-person).
2. #3 - Allow the users to send the support images, photos of their health conditions to the doctor.
3. #4, 5, 6 - Send a notification to inform users when it comes to any feedback from the doctor or the labs.

Build the product

User Flow Chart

1. Sign up & Registration

To reduce falloff on initial sign-up, we decided to separate sign-up and registration. For sign-up, we only ask the users for the information we need such as their personal information and a phone number for verification purposes. The patient can then log in to explore the application without committing too much personal data. They also have the option to complete the registration later, which needs to be done before they can use the services. This is an advantage for the users.

2. Booking appointment

Based on the research results, we concluded there are three ways a patient could book an appointment.

1. Book an appointment with a specific doctor (family doctor) based on their availability.
2. Book an appointment with the next available doctor. They may not have a family doctor or they feel their condition is urgent enough to see a doctor asap.
3. Contact care coordinator to request an appointment. Ther Care Coordinator will help the patient book the appointment with the doctor.

Wireframing

Low-fi wireframes

Using the flow chart as a reference we had an internal discussion with the team to make sure we covered all the scenarios. Some adjustments were suggested and were carried forward to the wireframe stage.

Mid-fi Wireframes

After considering several sketch options, we selected the best one to move forward.

Usability Test

With the completion of the Mid-fi Wireframes, we conducted the functional testing session with 5 people to validate our most important app flows. Tasks included:

1. Create an account
2. Book an appointment
3. Change an appointment
4. Start appointment

Findings from the session

1. Two-Step verification issue

   Users don't want to enter the validation code every time they log in, especially if they log in multiple times a day. But this verification is an extra layer of security for their account to ensure that they are the only ones who can access the account even if someone knows the password. For that reason, we can not skip this step.

   Solution - By implementing a similar method as online banking provides, giving users the option to select "Trust this device for 30 days"> so the users won't be asked to input a new code on that device for the next 30 days. This way greatly reduces the frequency of identity verification prompts for the users.

   
   

2. Select available date & time slots issue

   During the booking appointment flow, the users need to select a date and time which are available from the doctor's availability. The initial idea for this step is to let them select an available date on the calendar view then the system will show the available slots accordingly. Most of the participants like the flow of it, however since the screen is quite small so it's a bit difficult for them to interact with and the result is they often make unnecessary mistakes.

   Solution - We find another way to display the feature that still keeps the main flow but also gains the experience for the users when they interact with a mobile device - applying horizontal scroll for date selection. In this way, the swiping movement became more intuitive, the horizontal scrolling saves a lot of vertical screen space, then the layout is much more flexible.

   
   

Hi-fi Prototype

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Conclusions

Next step

• Conduct another usability test session with patients on a hi-fi prototype.
• Continue working on the care provider side.

What I learned

• It's important to ask the right questions during the user research stage. In some situations, offering the selections is better than an open answer.
• Accessibility guidelines. Challenge of balancing design choices with accessibility standards.
• Based on the end-user perspective, we considered the design on many screen-sized but prioritized the ones that matched their needs.