“How do we enable community and healthcare organizations to coordinate their clients' social care?”

Healthify is focused on addressing access to social services such as employment, housing, and food. These social factors are essential in determining health outcomes for individuals and communities.

My role

Conduct research on current landscape and competitors
Present market and user insights to internal stakeholders
Perform user interviews and usability tests
Collaborate with UI designers to iterate on designs
Design product implementation and support

The problem

Our healthcare system and social services sector are disconnected and internally fragmented making it difficult for people to get connected to the right services at the right time.

Discovery

The problem at hand was complex, involving multiple different stakeholders and systems, from hospitals to social services, to executives and administrators, as well as patients and clients themselves.

Desk Research

Our research was aimed at comprehending the current landscape of referrals and coordination between healthcare and social services, the cost-savings and business value of coordination, and the impact of social determinants on healthcare outcomes.

User & Stakeholder Interviews

We first spoke to existing and prospective clients to understand their financial, logistical, and cultural challenges to coordination. Once we had developed an understanding of the systemic challenges, we interviewed our end-users: care coordinators, social workers, and nurses.

Synthesis

Through collaboration between our client and user-facing, engineering, design, and executive teams, we developed user personas and user scenarios to guide our feature prioritization and user experience.

Ideation

We collaborated with a design agency to create initial wireframes for the coordination product. With a lot of problems to solve, we had to rigorously prioritize the most important elements of coordination by defining the use cases we needed to support immediately.

Mockup: Search Results

After a user completes a search, they can add multiple services to a referral.

Mockup: Referral Note

To add more context to a referral, a user can send an optional note with details about the client’s situation and needs.

Mockup: Incoming and Outgoing Referrals

Using this list, users and administrators can view all the incoming clients and well as referred clients for a particular time.

Iteration

To iron out superficial challenges with the product, I initially held a round of internal testing with Healthify employees. We then conducted usability tests with 6 end users in which they completed two main exercises: sending a referral to another agency as well as receiving a referral for a client.

Our initial user tests exposed a number of challenges including the:

language we were using in our platform from how we were defining referrals, to a clients or members, and services
context of and types of users who would be using our product
communication and implementation support our clients would require beyond the digital functionality of the product

Solution

The first market-ready version of our product, Healthify Coordinate, allowed a network of social service and healthcare agencies to coordinate the referrals of shared clientele.

In complement to the digital product, I led the design of an in-depth implementation program for the product including human resources, change management, communications, relationship building, and more.

Search Results Listing

Users can use filters and keywords to search for particular services in their clients’ area.

Referral Sending Modal

Users can input client and referral details into a form, which will then create a referral in the client’s record as well as send a copy of the referral to the receiving agency.

Social Services Referral

This screen allows a user and administrator to view all the details and activity on a referral as well as take actions to update the referral.

Impact

To read more about the implementation of Healthify Coordinate, click here (authored by me). The product continued to go through numerous iterations in its functional capabilities, user experience, and the implementation. It has been used to create and complete thousands of referrals across the nation.