Project Description
Plushcare was a startup when it built it’s first internal Electronic Medical Record (EMR) for it’s physicians to use when meeting with patients virtually. I and my team were tasked with helping build a new, updated EMR. At this point, I didn’t have much of a team, so I jumped in to start.
Top outcomes:
- • 14% overall lift in physician satisfaction
- • 28% increase in perceived ease of use
Project Details
Client Plushcare/Accolade, Inc.
Date 2021-2024
Skills Product leadership, product strategy, creative direction, team leadership, UX research, negotiation, collaboration, service design
Getting things done
Nothing about this project is pretty. We needed to move at speed as product leadership set a date to deliver. This is just an example of a request I made of the Chief Medical Officer to allow me to create a first-ever research cohort using the physicians we had. There had not been support for this kind of research before.
I got this approved, and the feedback from the physicians to leadership was overwhelmingly positive both on how I and my team conducted research, as well as finally feeling heard about their needs and concerns for the tool that was being built for them.
Plushcare EMR updates
Showing these images is kind of fruitless, honestly, because without context it doesn’t mean much. However, this is here more to show that the left side was the old EMR, and the new is on the right. With the help of physicians and a lot of prototypes, we developed a clearer sense of hierarchy, reduced eye-strain, increased discoverability, reduced training time, and introduced a messaging feature in-product that was a wildly successful concept for the physicians and front-line care coordinators.
- Started with the physicians first, doing a series of shadows, walk throughs of process, understanding how SOAP notes work, etc.
- Built initial prototypes, testing with little context but dropping them in situ to see how they would respond to new features
- Continually tested, iterated, and worked with engineering to quickly built the first iteration of the product
Visiontyping to tell a story
A tool I employ on my teams is called a visiontype. The idea is to tell a story of a brave future without writing code, and get alignment with stakeholders and leaders quickly so as to get moving on early iterations.
This visiontype I hired an illustrator to help do a comic strip style story of a person needing a specific kind of therapy. It would allow for a connected experience between physician, counselor, and patient (aka Collaborative Care), so that everyone would be aware of the patient’s status, and have all the information they needed, using a digital first perspective.
It was a well received concept. We were able to start the process on delivering on some of these features before leadership priorities changed and the project was shelved.