Building a common provider office-facing platform across markets and job roles
Overview
After 9 requirements gathering sessions with portfolio teams in CDOs across the southwestern market, my team was brought in to translate 15 functionalities into a portal experience serving 4 primary user groups. These user roles spanned from front office to physicians, clinical to non-clinical staff, internal to contracted employees. This portal would be a framework where, once proven in a highly complex market, would be scaled nationwide.
Outcomes
Depending on the role and functionalities being utilized, a user might access the portal a few times a year or up to multiple times a day. Key outcomes the new design needed to deliver were:
- Reduce time that users lose to technical processes
- Improve navigation and findability of information
- Simplify frequently-used pathways (scheduling, eligibility verification, patient data synchonization)
- Integrate data and logins from other tools and systems
Learning
We began our work by conducting interviews with team members from multiple Care Delivery Organizations (CDOs) in the market. Our role categories of inquiry included:
- Physician/Specialists
- Provider Relations Managers
- Nurse Practitioners/Medical Assistants
- Front Office/Admin Ops
As we made our way through interviews, we inquired about their daily work habits (often different in each practice office), the order they conduct tasks (different per individual), and complications they experience with the technical tools they're required to use. Most of the practice team members checked various tools multiple times a day to compare and contrast patient information. Contracted providers had no way of pulling a complete list of their patient panel, needing to log into multiple platforms to compile a list. Teams had a variety of ways to handle eligibility checks - some check the day before to save time, others wait until the day of appoibntment to avoid providing care that was not covered and now a full responsibility on the patient.
Once we had a few interviews completed for each role category, we began distilling our learnings into Insights, Key Tasks, Pains, and Wish List Items.
Visualizing our learnings and designing the future state
Know the current to design the future
After establishing a high-level understanding of the current experiences across roles, we met additional times with key individuals to gain a granular understanding of their current reality. Every detail we investigated provided us a refined understanding of the full ecosystem - eventually expanding beyond the understanding of our participants. This allowed us to not only design an intutive experience for the users of this portal, but to speak intelligently with engineer and data teams who would need to produce the end product. We knew exactly what each role was needing to accomplish in their job role and how they went about completing it. We also understood the technical dependencies that tied their workstreams together and could conduct informed (and sometimes challenging) conversations with product, data, and development teams as we designed the preferred, yet feasible, future state solution.
Designing for trust
To gain a holistic view of the future state, and to support solutioning conversations with developers, we used Service Blueprints for each core user role. We took key, repetitive workflows and mapped them to the stages and layers of players, frontstage, and backstage elements. This allowed us to solve technical complications and determine what we could fully deliver in version 1 and what would need to be rolled out over time as systems and tools reached the desired integration capabilities. Through this work, we could clearly communicate to CDOs and their teams a plan of functionality rollout.
Realizing the work
As service blueprints were becoming solidified, we began wireframing in tandem. Once we got approval for each workflow, we were able to quickly comp and prototype the workflows for testing with users. All in all, we spent about 4 months on the engagement and designed a next-generation portal for users along the care continuum that continues to be expanded in capability and market adoption.
A unified experience for high-quality care delivery.
