MedBridge | Selected Projects

SUMMARY

As MedBridge’s Senior Product Designer, my task has been to design products that “close the loop” for their enterprise product suite. Closing the loop means that providers can build therapy programs for patients, monitor progress, measure outcomes, track and report metrics, and interact with their patient in real-time. This consists of redesigning selected current products, researching and designing: a patient profile, program adherence data, and telehealth (video chat) experiences.

My ROLE

I am responsible for all of the user research, UX, visual, and interaction design for my products. I collaborate with product management on overall strategy. I provide all design assets (mockups, redlines, assets, etc.) to development, work with them to ensure understanding, adjusting and iterating as needed.

Users | Environment

MedBridge provides enterprise continuing education solutions across various medical fields: physical therapy, athletic therapy, occupational therapy, nursing, medical assistance, speech language pathology, and more. We provide several patient-facing portals — multiple responsive web apps, as well as iOS and Android native apps — for healthcare providers to access their education and patient information. Providers work with patients in the clinic, in hospitals, other care facilities, in the home, or in the workplace. Patients range in their age and ability (physical and cognitive).

Research

Note: For much more detail on my research and design process, check out: Select an Airplane Case Study

Program Adherence

This was the second phase of the Patient Profile redesign I had done earlier. The goal of this project was designing a product that allows providers to see data related to patients’ adherence to their prescribed program. Giving providers access to near real-time information on if their patients are doing their assigned activity, and how it is going.

From a competitive analysis perspective, I found that MedBridge’s direct competitors have varying levels of adherence reporting. Fortunately, most of it is pretty basic; some competitors even had none at all.

I conducted numerous interviews with providers, admins, and end users, at five strategic MedBridge customers. Initially, it was a fact-finding mission to understand how they perceive the problems around patient adherence and how they currently track adherence. During follow-up calls, we looked at mockups, prototypes, and eventually the final product.

Ultimately, I found that showing adherence trends was just the first step. Providers wanted the next layer of data as well: If patients are having issues or skipping exercises, let them report their barriers to success.

SketcheS & Exploration

Telehealth

A key component to “closing the loop” for MedBridge is a comprehensive telehealth solution. The first step was building a user-friendly, flexible video conference product. It needed to be self-contained, so it could be woven into the provider experience as well as the patient experiences (web and mobile apps).

In this case, MedBridge is ahead of its competitors, and the industry broadly. Insurance companies - including Medicare - are only just warming to the idea of allowing telehealth services to be billable. Despite this, there is a lot of legislation in place that affects telehealth products. A major part of my early research was literature reviewing regulations, organizational guidelines, and academic papers.

As with the Program Adherence project, I coordinated interviews with MedBridge customers. While there is strong support for a video conferencing product, my research also uncovered some technical challenges for customer adoption.

SketcheS & Exploration

Mockups

Patient Portal

Description

The Patient Portal is the primary web experience for patients to access their prescribed exercise program. This is a designed as a progressive web application. On mobile devices the experience more closely resembles MedBridge’s mobile apps. This project was a rebuild. The original application was several years old, and on aging technology.

Problem

I was asked to support all current functionality, make the visual design clean but not sterile, comport with branding (i.e., use of the GO button, and Poppins as the primary typeface), and modernize the overall product architecture and feature set. I had to do this while keeping everything consistent with the mobile app experiences. Also, HIPAA laws prevent a lot of direct patient research; patients are the primary users.

Solution

I built a research plan that used patient stand-ins: MedBridge employees who haven’t used the existing portal, as well as friends and family who lined up with our demographics. I had these individuals use the existing portal, in a simulated real world scenario, and gathered feedback. I followed-up with the prototypes I built and got additional feedback for subsequent iterations. In addition to my patient stand-ins, at this point, I widened my pool to include other customer personas, as well as other MedBridge staff. Ultimately, I settled on a richer visual design that scaled well across all device types.

I discovered a number of areas where the existing portal didn’t meet accessibility guidelines. Particularly with regard to contrast ratios, and relying on visual/audio details. These were resolved in the new product.

All existing features were modernized, and a number of additional features I proposed were accepted into the product as well. This included the ability to customize the playlist, a full-screen video experience, and a robust Activity page.

SELECTED MobilE EXAMPLES

Program Adherence

Description

It’s important for providers, admins, and clinic leadership to have accurate metrics. These include: how often exercises are completed, pain and difficulty ratings, reported barriers to adherence (e.g., didn’t have equipment, not enough time, etc.). In many cases, insurance reimbursement is tied to a patient’s treatment outcomes and the data show that better program adherence often leads to better outcomes.

Problem

It was important to understand the full scope of information users would like to see. Prior to this project, MedBridge simply showed which exercises were completed on a given day. And only showed a sliding window of seven days (which was very confusing to users) with no additional information.

Due to existing product architecture, I had to integrate the additional information into the Patient Profile UI without unnecessarily pushing key program details farther down on the page.

Solution

I determined through my user research that seeing adherence information – provided it’s the right information – is very important to the provider. I designed the interactive adherence card and placed it directly below the patient’s information.

The line chart’s y-axes show dates for each of the updates to the treatment program. Program adherence is indicated by a data point on the x-axis. Users can select a data point to see more information, and the selected program below will change to show the exercises for that program. The View Details link opens a full-page overlay with additional layers of detail.

The result is a clean, easy-to-use chart, with a lot more information a single click away. In the detailed view, users can also see what exercises are being skipped, marked as painful/easy/difficult, as well as how often each exercise is attempted. Users also have the option to view another layer of detail in a drawer.

Ultimately, users were no more than three clicks away from seeing day-to-day details for how the patient is progressing in their treatment. Almost none of this data was available before this design project.

SELECTED MobilE EXAMPLES

Telehealth

Description

MedBridge is among the first of its peers to pursue a comprehensive telehealth solution. Laws around telehealth are poised to change in 2020, allowing for expanded insurance billing. The telehealth solution is being tackled one phase at a time. The first phase was video conferencing and chat. Next up is scheduling, then billing, and more.

Problem

MedBridge has a variety of providers, across a number of professions. Patients vary significantly in demographics and ability. Therefore, I had three areas of concern: usability across all personas, technical infrastructure (e.g., poor connectivity in rural areas, device variety, etc.), and user adoption.

There were technical constraints as well. MedBridge leadership chose an off-the-shelf video conferencing SDK. This affected various design decisions.

Solution

All of the people I interviewed – provider, patient, and admins – had used some sort of video conferencing product before. Some only in a professional setting (e.g. Zoom, Lifesize, WebEx, etc.); however, almost all had used everyday products like FaceTime and Skype.

The phase one solution is a relatively straight-forward video conference experience. Additional requirements added more functionality to the product. This included the ability to take notes, see a history of calls, informed consent for patients, and post-call satisfaction surveys.

Patient Profile

Description

When it comes to interacting with patients, the Patient Portal is a provider’s first stop. This is where they can find pertinent personal information, program adherence, patient satisfaction responses, and exercise program information. Often, providers will spend a few minutes reviewing the exercise program and adherence, before meeting the patient.

Problem

This project was pretty straight-forward: Despite being rebuilt from scratch, it was, essentially, a redesign. For various technical reasons, I couldn’t change too much of the information architecture for the overall page. I also had to keep all of the existing functionality.

The main goal of this project modernizing the experience, and including comprehensive and interactive program adherence, and patient satisfaction areas.

Solution

I did combined research for the Patient Profile and Program Adherence projects, since the feedback informs both projects. Surprisingly, by and large, I found the Patient Profile wasn’t heavily used for its features. Instead, it was a stop on the way to the Home Exercise Program Builder. The reception to usability improvements, and new adherence/satisfaction functionality was very positive.

There is a longer-term roadmap of functionality and improvements that clearly indicated leaning in to the dashboard design approach. You can see this in the final design. While not a true dashboard, there is definitely inspiration.

Ultimately, users found the organization and clean design, paired with the addition of adherence and satisfaction, a more holistic solution..