Understanding our Users

Research

My specific role was obtaining knowledge of athena’s Population Health and Clinicals products so that I could successfully integrate the care plan - which is a lot more complex than just surfacing a widget on a screen.

I participated in the following research activities to familiarize myself with the users, their workflows, and the products themselves.

WORKSHOPS
On-site workshops to journey map and understand the Accountable Care Organization’s (ACO) pain-points

INTERVIEWS
Care Managers took us through their current workflows

JOURNEY MAPPING
Research informed the wireframes which I then validated by Subject Matter Experts and my development team

Alpha Release

Integration Opportunities

Care Managers keep a personalized care plan for every patient they manage and document details about their care in the events timeline.

In our 2018 Jobs to Be Done survey, we found huge opportunities in improving the Care Manager’s ability to log activities and time, which was also essential to successfully integrating our care plan micro-service into Population Health.

Alpha Release

Ship, Learn, & Iterate

We had two months to design and deliver a way to interact with the care plan outside of an event, so our strategy was to keep as close to the current functionality as possible while trying to make some minor improvements.

POSITIVE FEEDBACK

• Clients loved quick access to patient care plans

• Automatic events gave them confidence that all changes to a patient’s care plan would be logged

General Availability

Opportunities

Our alpha clients liked what we originally set out to do, but felt a couple new things needed to be addressed before making the care plan generally available.

We facilitated concept tests and interviews to understand more about the following areas, then circled back as we enhanced or created new experiences.

To reduce cognitive load, I mapped out the choices a user can make when creating/editing an event and where each action led. This helped to streamline buttons and save time when designing workflows to lock events.

With designs at this level, I was able to make changes to many states and see the impact of those decisions without having to flip through multiple art-boards.

Status Changes

Lock Events

In order for some events to lock and become part of the patient’s permanent medical record, we needed a smaller set of “true” statuses.

It wouldn’t be intuitive to have some of 14 statuses lock while others don’t, so we decided to separate the original list into “Statuses” and “Attempts”.

This allowed us to have 4 statuses: Scheduled, In Progress, Cancelled (Locked), and Completed (Locked).

Detailed reporting

Log Attempts

Care managers are often required to reach out to patients three times before they can switch focus to a new patient. They needed to be able to log their attempts to show that they made multiple efforts to reach out to patients.

When we enabled care managers to lock notes, we moved 10 of the previous statuses into the note details where they could describe how they attempted to reach a patient. We also made sure to add this into reports so that analysts could more easily track attempts as well.