Improving the patient list
Making clinicians more efficient and effective.
My role: Research, UX, UI
Project type: Business-facing SaaS dashboard, admin workflows
Collaborators: Clinicians, data engineers, developers
Healthcare providers using our software have long lists of patients to oversee, which can be overwhelming for them to organize and manage.
I made three iterative improvements to our patient list: showing providers only their own patients, flagging patients in need of additional support, and filtering patients by treatment and account status.
Each improvement made the providers’ workflows more efficient, made them happier with the product, and increased SaaS sales.
What was wrong with the status quo?
Problem statement
When providers opened our software, they saw a list of every patient at the clinic, regardless of who was treating each patient.
When I interviewed doctors and nutritionists, I found that they had two problems with this:
The list was overwhelming: providers had to scroll past a lot of patients assigned to other people in order to find their own patients. They resorted to making separate spreadsheets of their own patients and using the Search function to find their patients in our software, which was cumbersome.
Privacy concerns: providers did not want their patients’ data to be visible to other providers who were not treating those patients.
All patients were shown to every provider, which was overwhelming and raised privacy concerns.
First improvement: assign patients to providers
First iteration
I discussed these concerns with the head of the digital team and the head engineer. We decided that since the privacy concerns were preventing us from gaining some large accounts, we needed to tackle that first.
Our solution was to add a feature where patients could be assigned to specific providers. We then updated the patient list so that providers only saw their assigned patients.
I conducted more interviews with providers and worked with the data team to make sure our implementation would allow enough flexibility for clinics with different needs. Then I reviewed our existing screens and identified the places where users should be able to manage patient-provider relationships. Using our existing design system, I added that functionality to those screens.
Providers appreciated seeing only their patients in the patient list, and we were able to gain the large accounts that had been holding out for these privacy improvements.
By showing providers only the patients assigned to them, I solved the privacy concerns and made the patient list less overwhelming.
Second improvement: success predictor
Second iteration
Many providers still had a long list of patients to treat and still had to do extra work to help them prioritize which patients to check in with.
The Data Science team had been working on a machine learning model that predicted which patients would need more support to succeed, and I realized that adding this feature to the patient list could simplify providers’ workflows.
After testing a few ideas with providers, I simplified the output of the model into a binary check/flag indicator that would tell them whether a patient was doing well or needed extra attention. I added this check/flag to the patient list so that providers could easily scan the list and prioritize their patients based on who needed the most help.
Providers loved this feature and it became a main driver of our SaaS sales.
I made the patient list more scannable by indicating which patients were most in need of help.
Third improvement: filters
Third iteration
Up to this point, the patient list had no filtering options. Providers could sort the list by useful attributes like total weight lost, time in program, and success flag, but it became clear that this was not enough.
Most weight loss clinics offer more than one treatment (surgery, medication, gastric balloon, etc.), but many clinics were hesitant to use our software for all their patients. When I interviewed them, I found that they did not want patients with different treatments all mixed together in their patient list. Patients with different treatments have different needs and different weight loss trajectories so providers wanted to view each intervention separately.
I also found that providers sometimes needed to identify patients whose accounts needed attention. Sometimes former patients returned to the clinic and their accounts needed to be reactivated, and sometimes patients’ profiles were missing necessary information and needed to be updated. So far, their only recourse had been to contact customer support which is a cumbersome process.
To solve this, I added filters to the patient list, which addressed both of these pain points.
Providers were very happy with these improvements. It simplified their workflow and cut down on the number of times they had to contact customer support about patient account issues.
By allowing providers to filter by treatment and account status, I further simplified the patient list and provider workflows.
How this helped providers
Impact
Each new improvement helped providers narrow down their patient list.
This resulted in a smoother, more productive experience for providers and more SaaS sales for us. Everybody wins!
Each incremental change improved workflow efficiency, increased customer satisfaction and boosted SaaS sales.
