User research
The LifeWallet team interviewed professionals from Urgent Cares, Emergency Departments, Primary Care, and specialist facilities within a large health system in North Carolina. Working with the innovation team, we developed user stories to understand the strengths and challenges of various roles, focusing on improving appointment booking inefficiencies.
Key findings
Our research found that legacy EHR systems significantly restricted appointment creation, forcing call center staff to memorize schedules and preferences for over 200 providers. This made booking appointments difficult and impacted patient satisfaction. Analysis of Press-Ganey Scores highlighted concerns with appointment bookings. Call center employees often had to make callbacks to confirm provider schedules.
Unfortunately, these callbacks often resulted in missed calls and lost appointments, as patients didn't recognize the numbers.
User journeys
Based on our research findings, we mapped out various user stories covering key roles within the system. This included different patient scenarios, from arrival at the facility to a detailed look at the administrator's role and tasks. We also explored how front office staff utilize the system.
Flexible scheduling
In the initial setup of appointments, we introduced a streamlined approach for administrators to customize the status of each appointment. We also added a feature allowing providers to adjust their schedules and take breaks as needed.
Previously, EHR systems required providers to use 15-minute slots for all appointments. To create longer slots, they had to group multiple blocks together and rename them, which was a clever workaround. We improved this by allowing providers to set their own appointment durations, making scheduling much more flexible.
Call center bookings
The call center app was designed to be extremely user-friendly for staff when on the phone with patients. The interface featured three selection boxes on the left-hand side, providing a guided workflow. Typically, staff members started the process by identifying the patient, specifying the reason for their visit, and concluding by selecting a provider. The user experience win was in the interconnected nature of these selections, which intelligently refined available appointment slots as the process unfolded.
Upon completing the selection process, an availability calendar would emerge on the right-hand side of the screen. While the design initially included plans for month and day views, the initial rollout was a week only view.
The pilot program we tested out showed significant advancements in booking metrics, with improvements in both the speed of appointment booking through shorter call durations and the overall volume of patient appointments booked.
Patient bookings
Following the successful implementation of the one-way call center app, the LifeWallet team embarked on creating a mobile-responsive patient booking application. This would allow patients to independently schedule policy-approved appointments, alleviating some of the load on call center resources. The patient experience in the booking process worked similarly to the call center application, offering various entry points that triggered a decision tree model as they made selections.
Enhancing patient convenience, the booking process extended to an in-facility tablet for on-site reservations and check-ins. Patients were also provided the added benefit of tracking their position in the queue through a TV display application in the waiting rooms.
UX updates
Wrapping up the trio is the daily schedule application that administrators use for an overall look at appointments across the facility. This module also helps out front-desk staff, giving them a handle on patient progress through appointment stages. As we fine-tuned this module, our feedback showed that adding hover interactions on the main screen was much smoother experience than clicking into each appointment to update status. The second iteration weaved these hover features into the application. Now, front-desk staff could simply hover over a patient's picture to grab contact info for calls or texts. Likewise, hovering over the current status made hopping from in-line to roomed, or from in-session to checked-out a much easier process.
Insights & reporting
Lastly, a reporting application was introduced that afforded administrators the convenience of assessing their facility's performance. This was really well received as it effectively circumvented the old method of submitting IT tickets for data exports, followed by individual efforts to visualize the data. By streamlining this process, we eliminated several steps. Administrators could now access valuable insights such as the total count of appointments within specified timeframes, the most frequently booked appointment types, and a breakdown of which providers were seeing the most patients.