Overview

After developing a comprehensive set of virtual care services, MD Live identified an opportunity to support patients who wanted to track their progress across multiple appointments.

I led the research and design of a new assessment service that enables patients to complete mental health evaluations and track their progress directly within the MD Live platform.

Understanding the Problem

One challenge with virtual care is replicating the sense of connection and personal care that comes with an in-person doctor's visit. MD Live has faced this issue as well, with feedback highlighting difficulties in maintaining strong connections between providers and patients.

“Some people mention that scheduling ongoing appointments with the same therapist can be something of a challenge.” - Healthline

To address this, MD Live has introduced several features to help patients build stronger relationships with their preferred providers. For patients using mental health services, the team aimed to create a way for providers and patients to assess and track progress over multiple virtual sessions.

Aligning on a Direction

At the beginning of the project, I conducted research and analyzed how other platforms were tracking patient progress. I then met with stakeholders from the project management and clinical teams to share my findings and align on the next steps. The team decided to offer patients a series of assessments that would help providers evaluate their progress. Additionally, we planned to include a feature that would allow patients to track their own progress as well.

After reviewing with the team, we identified several key takeaways:

• We found inconsistencies in how we communicated and presented various scheduling options.

• There were multiple versions of components and styles, which resulted in accessibility issues.

• To support future features like skipping payment, scheduling multiple visits, and others, we needed to redesign the checkout page.

A Phased Approach

Once the team aligned on the direction, I began planning and detailing the approach to build the agreed-upon features and experience. I first focused on designing a workflow for presenting and organizing the different assessments. Then, I integrated these into an overall user flow that connected the experience across both web and mobile platforms.

Testing and Refining

Over several weeks, as I moved from initial sketches to detailed user flows, I reviewed the designs with stakeholders and tested them with users to address any pain points. One key piece of feedback from users was the need for more context and explanation about the different assessments and why patients were taking them. In response, I added a page in the user flow that provided instructions and details about each assessment before users began.

Another important piece of feedback came from the results and progress pages. Test participants mentioned that the results weren’t clear, and they didn’t know what steps to take next. After several iterations, I simplified these pages by focusing less on the scoring system and more on clearly presenting the results and the next steps for the patient.

As I moved to high-fidelity designs and finalized all the pages in the user flow, I carefully considered the differences between the web and mobile platforms. Taking into account the varying screen sizes, I worked closely with the engineering teams for each platform to ensure all components and elements I designed could be properly built. To wrap up the project, I created detailed documentation outlining the user testing methods and results from throughout the process.

Lessons Learned

Overall, we successfully developed a feature that significantly improved the experience for our mental health patients on the platform. The evaluations allowed providers to clearly track and quantify their patients' progress, while patients could easily understand their conditions and the steps they needed to take. From a business perspective, the feature also helped drive patient scheduling and kept users engaged with the platform.

What I learned from this project was the importance of teamwork in building a product or feature. The clinical team provided valuable insights into the provider’s perspective and how these evaluations benefited them. The project management team helped align the business goals with the various ideas being considered. Engineering brought the technical expertise needed to implement the solutions, while the design team focused on user experience and accessibility. Although I led the project and handled much of the day-to-day work, I couldn’t have reached this outcome without the contributions of everyone involved.