Mindful Care

Leading the design efforts for a self-scheduling feature within our ever-evolving patient intake process was quite the challenge. Ultimately, the most gratifying aspect was witnessing the positive outcomes in facilitating patients’ appointment scheduling and ensuring their satisfaction.

This feature has been shipped to the average 2,000 weekly new patients that sign up for Mindful Care services.

Role                    Duration                   Team
UX/UI Designer          Jan ‑ May 2024           Product, Engineering, Marketing

 

High-level Overview

Context

Mindful Care is an Urgent Mental Health start-up focusing primarily on same-day and next-day care for their patients. Similar to an urgent care facility, the patients coming in are expecting to see someone in a timely manner. Mindful Care, striving for tech-enabled efficiency, is challenged by a manual patient scheduling process.

Appointment request sent screen

 

Problem

The Mindful Care intake process is very manual for the scheduling team. Patients must fill out all of the critical info in order to be scheduled. However, once that information is passed along, it is tedious and time consuming for schedulers to find an availability that works.

The scheduling team often unknowingly schedules appointments during inconvenient times, with a randomly selected provider, resulting in high cancellation rates.

High level user workflows, both patient and scheduler

 

Goal and Success Metrics

 

Final Product

The improved scheduling process allows patients to find a provider match, find an open day and time, and reserve a time before continuing through to receive care.

Mindful Care appointment reserved screen  

 

Full Design Process

Research

To better understand our patients pain points, I led 8 interviews and synthesized qualitative survey feedback I’d been collecting over the course of 2 years.

Mindful Care Research Insights  

Mindful Care Patient Sign up Process - Before  

Impact

Mindful Care schedulers averaged 73 new appointments daily, spending about 12 hours scheduling patients and coordinating times. Equating to roughly $5,000 per month in timecost, optimizing scheduling would allow them to focus on more critical cases and improve patient experiences.

“It was over a week before anyone responded to my initial application, less than ideal. I would have appreciated scheduling a time so I knew I had an appointment"
-Patient, Mindful Care

“We spend the majority of our days doing outreach and scheduling patients. To have that lessened by even a fraction would help us out tremendously as a department."
-Patient Experience Team Scheduler, Mindful Care

 

Opportunity

Providing a way to schedule more efficiently, or give the ability for a patient to schedule their own preliminary appointment would help create a better experience for them and optimize the efforts of the scheduling team.

 

Prioritization

In working with the Product, Engineering, and Patient Experience Team, we discussed the current provider matching workflow alongside the user experience. The decision boiled down to prioritizing something we called self-scheduling. Prioritization Workshop Session Sticky Notes

 

Design Decision #1: Creating an entry point

Patients signing up needed a convenient way to select a time during the registration process. After our intake workflow, where we capture critical information for both care and business practice, my team found an ideal spot to place this. Added entry point screen into onboarding workflow, leading to self scheduling  

Design Decision #2: Displaying Providers

In order to give patients the option to choose a provider for their sessions, we had to display any and all applicable providers. With some backend logic, we were able to filter for State, Insurance, Service and any additional preferences the patient added in. Lo-Fi to Hi-Fi screens for Displaying providers  

Design Decision #3: Displaying Provider Information

In order to know if a provider would match their preferences, a patient would be able to learn more about them on their profile page, as well as select an available time and date from a scheduling component Lo-Fi to Hi-Fi screens for displaying availability and provider information

 

 

Final Prototype

After many versions of screens, user testing, bug fixes and more – the team finally was able to create our first version of self-scheduling that was successfully launched to the patient audience. Similar to the animation below, new patients were able to select a provider and book an appointment upon launch. Self-scheduling workflow GIF

 

 

Design Handoff

Since we worked primarily out of Jira, I created feature-specific Figma file sections for each task within a file. I often added sticky notes to provide behavior and state details. Close collaboration was needed to deliver this flagship feature within a 5-month timeframe.

Smaller handoff image, one section with notes for my devs Large handoff image, all of the different pages in full

 

Outcomes

Three outcomes from the Self-Scheduling Feature build

 

Takeaways

I enjoyed many of my projects with Mindful Care, but none of them felt like they had as much as impact as this one. Not only did we deliver something that patients wanted, but it helped out our scheduling team efficiency and saved us hours of manual work. Through lots of cross-functional discussions, bug-squashing sessions, user-feedback sessions and more - we found a way to get this to our patients.

This project taught me that you can’t let perfection be the enemy of good. Make something that works, ship it, and learn from there.