Engagement and Preventive Care
MyChart Patient Engagement & Remote Patient Monitoring
Leveraging AI, smart devices, and more easily connecting patients to their providers to improve patient health outcomes and close care gaps.
Product lead shoutout in a division meeting for pioneering our first MyChart AI project!
Key outcomes
Due to my work being under NDA, I can’t share about the full process or outcomes. However, here are a few examples that illustrate my caliber of work:
Pioneering initial designs for our first patient-facing AI features
Leading design sprints with product leads and key stakeholders
Gathering customer feedback from organization stakeholders
Creating new design system components
Quick iteration and pivoting to move with AI (and conversational AI), and both design and healthcare industry standards.
Problem
Patients struggle with keeping up with their ongoing health conditions. While Epic can open more digital front doors and provide different avenues for omnichannel experiences, there are still barriers to entry for a holistic patient experience including:
access to care
non-personalized experiences
lack of transparency with their care team
organization road blocks, including buy-in and prioritizing their own needs over patient needs
Goal
As the sole user experience designer for Care Companion, my goal is to take these problems and innovate solutions that are focused on being:
Proactive - preventing illness in the first place while encouraging patients to be proactive in their own care
Easy - Always providing the patients with a next step action with the right content at the right time
Integrated - Connecting with the latest devices with IoT and remote patient monitoring tools…
Innovative with AI - Reducing clinical burden and gently nudging patients in the direction that would make their care easier.
How might we…
Mapping out the ideal workflow, or “Golden Path” to help illustrate the patient journey
Affinity mapping and pulling common themes for each piece of functionality
Research & Insights
Trends indicated a gap in functionality with where industry trends are moving, a lack of discoverability of key features, and opportunity to surface the right information at the right time.
Starting with base KPIs helped give a better understanding of what patients are doing well with the existing UI and where our pitfalls are. Additionally, being in knowledgeable and continually learning about where the puck is moving in the health tech industry, helps frame some potential areas that patients would not only want, but expect from Epic. My research included:
Design sprinting with key stakeholders, including my product leads, lead developers, and content owners
Robust feedback sessions with customer health organizations and internal leads
Feature tracking to identify the problem areas
Secondary research to stay up to date with industry trends
Help non-designers design how they envision the future of the product
Conducting usability testing for this project at a hospital in Duluth, MN.
Design
After synthesizing all the feedback, I was ready to hit the ground running. In addition to iterating on our existing features, I wanted to ensure implementation of other features that would help us keep ahead of the curve, while still feeling like an integrated part of the MyChart suite. Finding a balance of this process meant:
Pioneering the initial designs for our patient-facing AI features
Getting frequent feedback from UX designers in the area
Thinking outside of the box, taking into consideration legal, patient safety, and international constraints
Testing
Testing my designs through onsite usability testing at health organizations, virtual testing, and with internal staff helped me discover patient sentiments about AI and clarity of navigation.
I was able to bring a few of my projects, including this one, for onsite feedback at a health organization I visited. I was able to interview patients to specifically understand their adoption of AI and feelings around the integration of those features, if navigation was clear, and information hierarchy made sense.
Interestingly, a majority of the patients I interviewed were skeptical of AI in healthcare, despite an overwhelming amount of existing research indicating otherwise of the same age range. This is likely due to the fact of the smaller sample size I was able to gather in comparison to the quantitative data online, as well as any skew from regional demographics. However, a lot of their sentiments still remain true and just as prevalent when designing, including:
AI needs to be purposeful, used appropriately, and with transparency. Patient safety comes first, and making sure they have something they can understand and learn to trust is important.
Some existing paradigms gotta go. Learning which components can be modernized or sun-setted entirely, especially if they led to misclicks or unexpected interactions.
Overall, orgs are happy! They're pleased with the direction the team is going in, confident that it'll help set their patients up for better adherence to their care journeys and maintain on the path to overall wellness.
Impact
What I'm working on hasn't been released yet, so KPIs aren't ready quite yet. however, I'm confident the updated design pushes the needle in the right direction towards innovation in the digital space, especially having feedback from real patients, customers, and key stakeholders. Focusing on a few key pillars was really helpful:
Notifying patients in the right way, to drive patient engagement
Integrating AI features
Surfacing the right information at the right stage of the patient journey
Cleaning up and modernizing the UI, while integrating with the system
Care Companion focuses on interactive care for patients with ongoing medical conditions, helping them complete tasks to stay on track with their health goals, connect with their care team, improve long-term health, and more.