Have you ever wondered how a system that schedules almost one-third of all doctor appointments in America can be improved? In this study, I will share how my team and I effectively implemented a nationwide solution for HCA, the largest healthcare network in the country.
My Role
I served as the lead user experience architect of an agile development team at ShareCare for 8 months. Our team comprised 2 product managers, 8 backend developers, 2 frontend developers, and myself. My role involved defining business requirements, conducting user research, prototyping/testing, visual design, and serving as a mediator between the technical team and business stakeholders.
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The Challenge
HCA, or Hospital Corporation of America, is a US-based operator of healthcare facilities that operates on a for-profit model. With its headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, it currently manages a total of 168 hospitals and 116 freestanding surgery centers in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Call centers play a crucial role in managing patient intake for various healthcare facilities. However, these centers often struggle with outdated systems that operate slowly and have complex workflows, making even the simplest tasks challenging to complete.
The primary role of call center agents is to efficiently direct patients to the right facility or provider based on their needs. Unfortunately, the current call center application does not allow for direct booking of appointments, resulting in patients having to repeat themselves to multiple individuals, leading to a poor user experience.
The Approach
In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of this project, I dedicated a significant amount of time to working on-site and conducting interviews with call center managers and their agents.
Through close observation of the daily operations of these facilities and gaining insight into the roles and responsibilities of call center agents, my team and I have identified numerous pain points within their application. To facilitate future testing of prototypes and feedback gathering, I have established strong relationships with both managers and agents.
Navigating the healthcare industry can be a challenging task, especially when the requirements are not well-defined or subject to rapid change. Initially, I faced several obstacles in developing a scalable solution for this highly complex environment. However, by collaborating closely with product managers, we were able to analyze and refine the requirements, ultimately crafting a clean, robust, and efficient application.
The Discovery
During our discovery work, we gained valuable insights that highlighted several areas where a new user interface could significantly enhance the daily operations of call center agents. We discovered that the current call center application only permits agents to suggest the top provider in their search results. However, we noticed that agents would sometimes manipulate the search criteria to prioritize a lower-ranked provider.
Top provider
As an agent, it is important to adhere to business rules and avoid recommending the top provider in search results. This act was witnessed on many occasions despite Violating this rule could lead to costly lawsuits.
Provider profiles
Unfortunately, the current call center application only displays basic information about providers, limiting the agent’s ability to make top recommendations.
Search experience
Additionally, the sluggish search experience and poor layout of the application create a frustrating user experience, requiring constant scrolling.
Online instant booking
To make matters worse, patients cannot book appointments directly and must speak with different people, leading to frustration and repetition of information.
When interacting with patients, call center agents are evaluated based on their ability to quickly screen the patient and suggest a suitable provider. However, these agents are provided with minimal information about the available providers, making it challenging to make the best recommendations. Additionally, the search experience for finding a doctor can be slow and tedious for both agents and patients.
Old Call Center Application
The Vision
We aimed to develop a contemporary, practical, and effective user interface that aligns with the demographics of agents. Our objective was to seamlessly incorporate a patient scheduling tool into their call center operations, empowering agents to schedule appointments immediately instead of relying on indirect referrals. Moreover, we strived to provide agents with a reliable tool that caters to their every requirement, enhances the speed of their calls, and encourages them to select the top provider in the search results.
The Framework
Before starting any design, we spent a great deal of time making sense of existing workflows and content. This involved several weeks going back and forth with HCA to validate and identify requirements. We faced particular challenges with understanding complex business rules and terminology as we found that functionality and language varied between healthcare facilities. Mapping out the workflows was also challenging as health care involves many different touch points with many different people.
Strategic Thinking
In order to help understand many of the complex processes involved in the business requirements, I mapped out workflows of the existing call center experience. Doing so helped me to understand the areas where our application would minimize some of the pain agents experienced as well as highlight opportunities where we could really try to innovate.
Feature Based Development
Our team identified urgent areas in the existing required attention. To tackle the project effectively, we divided it into different features that would form the application as a whole. We aimed to develop the application with an API framework that allows us to reuse application features for future products. We focused on improving the search experience for finding providers and enabling users to book appointments with providers at any facility.
Prior to the call center interface, we built a low-fidelity stand-alone widget to support the ability to book an appointment online. The widget was built with the intention of use on 3rd party applications.
User Research
Bringing forth innovation to a call center experience is a challenging effort. I along with the project management team identified all of the potential users of our application and I then created personas for each user. Using the demographics of these users I then researched industry leaders and current trends to identify the potential areas that could be enhanced in our application. I used usertesting.com and userzoom.com as platforms to conduct research on our competitors and other applications that shared similar functionality.
Betterdoctor, Zocdoc, Vitals, and Healthgrades were websites used to test finding a doctor. Airbnb and Zillow were other platforms we tested that had innovative and trendy search experiences. It became clear after creating user personas which search experiences and features would need to be adopted by our new application.
Hi Fidelity Mockups
To move forward with the design I used Photoshop to create sets of detailed mockups. Due to our aggressive timelines, this approach was beneficial in showing our stakeholder’s design progress – however, was very time-consuming considering the constant change in scope and requirements.
Prototyping & Testing
I created detailed prototypes of the various widgets in Axure that made up the call center experience. From there I performed usability tests internally within our company as well as externally with call center agents to validate the flow and design decisions that were made. I also used Invision to form clickable prototypes for presenting to stakeholders.
The Result
The implementation process for this application was very extensive due to the number of stakeholders in the project and the sheer size of HCA, an international multi-billion dollar corporation with 204,000 employees. The pilot launch was in the San Antonio market to a group of 3,000 providers.
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Agents have reported average call times have been reduced.
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The ability to book appointments instantly for providers was successful.
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Agents now trust the data enough to recommend the top providers.
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The modern interface is easier and more familiar for agents to navigate.
Passion leads to success