PlushCare Case Study
In this project I worked on a team of 4 UX Designers
Client
PlushCare is a Telemedicine company that allows patients to receive medical consultations from doctors remotely from a web application.
We were specifically asked to design for the perspective of the doctors. The client wants to create a simpler, streamlined experience for doctors offering efficiency, better productivity and a more flexible product.
Design Process
We interviewed the stakeholders where we learned Plushcare doctors use an electronic health records (EHR) platform called Practice Fusion to have all the patients information and use Plushcare for their calendar appointments, conduct the actual consultation and prescribe medication.
Also we learned there is not an “on the go” product so doctors don’t have flexibility to conduct consultations out of their desktop.
We needed to know more about our main user and we conducted interviews with PlushCare doctors. They expressed that:
- Toggling between PlushCare and Practice Fusion in order to coordinate patient information can be inconvenient,
- The communication process between patient and doctor for follow up can be difficult at times.
- There's difficulty to take SOAP notes.
We couldn't leave other doctors away from our research, so we interviewed non-PlushCare doctors and we identified:
- What is the standard process in doctor/patient consultation,
- What is the most relevant information for doctor’s to have on hand before and during the consultation,
- What methods do doctors use in order to take accurate SOAP notes
From our interview results we also uncovered the importance of reviewing medical history before a consultation.
First Hypothesis
Based on our first hypothesis we worked on a responsive website design that resolves Practice Fusion integration, patient doctor communication and SOAP notes. We learned that Practice Fusion was working in a API so we assumed having this integration in to PlushCare will facilitate doctor’s job.
Our challenges
After presenting our ideas in design studio, a lot of gaps were exposed and we found our approach wasn’t very clear so we decided to investigate more.
We knew that the current product needed some improvements but we also knew that a mobile app will help doctors to have more flexible consultations. We had a conference with the stakeholders to analyze the situation and we decided to conduct a survey in order to come up with more answers.
Survey results
- Revealed the advantage of having a mobile application to supplement the current desktop platform
- Reinforced the importance of moving to mobile
More than 90% of doctors would find a mobile version of the application useful as they can conduct consultations on-the-go. The majority of them also would prefer using their smartphone, rather than a tablet
Persona
After this research we built our persona
Based on Denise paint points we worked on the 3 key findings.
Solution 1: mobile app
We conducted a survey and learned that more than 90% of doctors would find a mobile version of the application useful as they can conduct consultations on-the-go. The majority of them also would prefer using their smartphone, rather than a tablet.
This information helped us formulate our first hypothesis which is PlushCare doctors would prefer the flexibility to conduct their consultations on-the-go.
Solution 2: integration of the most important data from Practice Fusion.
We did some research in how we can offer to doctors easy access to the primary information they need during a remote consultation. We found Practice Fusion is already working in API so we decided to assume this will happen and worked in the data integration.
We continued doing some research about what is the critical patient information doctor needs to have quick access and we added this to our design.
Solution 3: recording/dictation feature.
After conducting several interviews with doctors, we learned that they are very busy people. They see on average 15-30 patients a day. This is why it is fairly common for doctors to dictate after a consultation with a patient. The dictation is simply an audio record for doctors to remind themselves about the details of their appointments.
Next steps
When we did our interviews, we uncovered another major problem that the doctors were having. It was difficult for them to follow up with patients and vice-versa. Therefore, we hypothesized that an in-app messaging system will facilitate better communication between doctors and patients without giving away their personal contact information.
Our current solution is based on the assumption that Practice Fusion is integrated with PlushCare. But what if this magical API doesn’t exist or never will exist. We explored the idea of installing a chrome extension to solve the problem of toggling between Practice Fusion and PlushCare. So doctors can review patient’s medical history during the consultation.