*Autism Care
THE BRIEF
Design a custom web app that automates a child’s care schedule for recurring neurology, clinical therapy, and behavioral therapy visits.
*Client under NDA.
THE CHALLENGE
Conducting operational research and building an intuitive product that takes complex business needs and enterprise users’ needs into account.
MY ROLE
Currently shipping web designs for the past 1.5 years on a sprint based schedule. My role includes operational research, user research, product strategy workshops, wireframing, prototyping, user testing, and UI. Designs are responsive Web,
THE RESULT
Reduced wait time to schedule first visit from 6 months to 1 week.
Reduced new patient time to creation from 7m to 2m, a 60% increase in efficiency.
2x as many therapies scheduled per scheduler.
Current Operational Workflow to Schedule Clients
I conducted workshops with the company’s stakeholders and schedulers to better understand the complexity of scheduling appointments at 7 different clinics.
Their current scheduling workflow consisted of excel sheets and Central Reach. While scheduling for a client, a scheduler typically had 6 excel sheets open for reference. These sheets were pivotal for time consuming decisions, and it was the company’s goal to eliminate them with our new product.
Scheduling Challenges
There were a variety of unique scheduling challenges schedulers needed to consider while building a schedule, including insurance approval, parent requests, provider and client availability, and therapy administration best practices.
Schedulers also needed to consider the priority of providers and clients while scheduling. The business needed to provide a minimum number of appointments per provider, and they needed to assess which clients from the waitlist should be scheduled before other clients.
Client Needs
I also conducted interviews with the parents of children visiting the clinics to understand their needs in terms of scheduling.
The most important factor for them was getting their child’s first appointment scheduled. Due to demand, the wait time for a first appointment was 6 months at minimum. The second most important factor was consistency in care.
Our Goal for V1
Automate it.
Develop a product that can suggest the soonest available time slot for client appointments based off of provider/client availability, business rules, and therapy recommendations.
Keep Scheduler’s Involved.
Schedulers wanted the final say in booking an appointment, since they could best gage who clients would work well with and whether the suggestions met all business needs.
Make it Fast and Easy.
Changing a workflow is never easy, and getting adoption from the schedulers was a main goal of ours.
Core Product Features
The Calendar.
The calendar was designed to be a place the scheduler never had to leave. They could filter calendars by clinics, availability, providers, and clients (plus many more). They could save a complex series of filters, and look up multiple calendars at once with custom planner day and week views. If they selected ‘Add New’, a form would slide in from the left for them to add an appointment while never losing transparency into the filters they had pulled up.
Appointment Blocks.
Schedulers wanted to understand important appointment information about existing appointments to help them schedule surrounding slots. They wanted to view client name(s), appt. specialty, appt. location, and appt. status. To reduce the cognitive load of listing all of this information on each small block, I incorporated icons to represent location (in-clinic, telehealth, or home) and status next to each appointment specialty.
The Smart Suggestion.
After inputting all pertinent appointment information, like appointment type, location, and payment method, the system would suggest the soonest available time slots for an appointment. From this screen, scheduler’s could review all suggestions and choose one, or drag and drop a suggestion to best fit the client’s and business’s need.
The Waitlist.
We decided to develop a waitlist system that kept all clients on a waitlist until they had fully completed their entire care plan. This concept of a continuous waitlist kept schedulers on top of who had outstanding therapies, how long they were waiting, and what they were waiting for. Appointments on the waitlist would have a ‘Schedule’ button if the software found a potential appointment slot.
More on the way…
Beyond the scheduling system, I have been working on a member portal for parents, a provider portal for therapy recommendations, and ticketing system for schedulers. We are also iterating on the scheduling system to make it the best possible product for schedulers and clients.
