Patient Support App

Soulfx Technologies Inc

Soulfx's Patient Support Application is a web-based platform developed for a healthcare firm. It facilitates the remote management and operation of a service that provides financial assistance to Canadian patients for medical payments such as prescriptions and therapy.

Client: Multinational healthcare firm

Role: Software designer

Teammates: 1 UX designer, 4 developers, 1 product owner, and 1 project manager

Duration: 8 weeks

Status: Launched 🚀

Due to a non-disclosure agreement, mockup components that would contain manufacturer, program or drug names have been populated with placeholder text.

Overview

Soulfx Technologies Inc is a Mississauga-based software consulting firm that focuses on creating applications for clients within the healthcare industry. We worked closely with a multinational healthcare client in executing an end-to-end design project.

Soulfx specializes in the development of software products that drive innovation within the healthcare sector.

Context

COVID-19 has brought with it a global-scale challenge that has pushed the capacity of our healthcare industries to their limits. Our client approached us with the objective of moving their financial aid service online—a shift towards web-based operations aimed at mitigating the risks imposed by the pandemic on immunocompromised individuals.

Our client needed a platform through which they can deliver their support service to patients remotely.

An outline of our approach

Our Client's Assistance Service

Manufacturers registered under our client's service platform offer their own collection of financial assistance and/or therapy program plans, which provide prescription certificates. These certificates in turn can be redeemed by patients for reimbursements upon purchasing select drugs.

Our client works alongside pharmaceutical manufacturers in making prescription payment easier by providing reimbursements for medical expenses.

Jobs-to-Be-Done

We designed our client's application from the ground up—however, we worked with a service that was already in operation. Thus, we conducted generative research with the intention of identifying our user groups and what outcomes each group wants to achieve by interacting with our platform.

Our user groups and objectives

We learned about who our users are and what they want out of our platform. What do their journeys within the existing service look like?

The Reimbursement Lifecycle

We sought to get an in-depth look at how the support platform itself works and how our users interact with it. I created a lifecycle diagram to document the steps taken from onboarding a new manufacturer to distributing the manufacturer's program cards to patients.

End-to-end reimbursement flow

Upon mapping out the patient journey, we learned that each program could provide only one of two types of certificates.

National-level certificates enable reimbursement access to patients regardless of province, while provincial-level certificates restrict a program's availability to specified provinces. Furthermore, the availability of cards offered by programs continuously fluctuate based on demand.

Record Information Architecture

It became clear from modelling the caseworker journey that there was a discernible hierarchy in how records are organized.

I took this as an opportunity to create an architecture diagram and illustrate a granular view of the details being managed within each tier of information.

Visualizing architecture made it easier to keep track of how records are structured

Due to the limited amount of time we had to develop a comprehensive understanding of our client's support program, these flows would play a critical role later in the project with ensuring alignment with our developers.

Clarity was established regarding how our client's service operates. How can we ensure that our to-be design encompasses the tasks we have outlined?

Our Designed Solution

Our designed solution is an application consisting of two components: a record management dashboard for our caseworkers and a small public-facing portal for our patients to retrieve program cards through.

Record Management Dashboard

We employed a single-column layout to allow caseworkers to quickly scan top-down through lists and record details—this pattern is kept consistent across all tiers of information.

Company and certificate record lists

Company and program record details

Record additon

Public-facing Portal

We aimed to make the card retrieval screens as simple as possible for our early adopters and easy to navigate using both desktop and touch inputs.

Program selection and card retrieval

Working under tight deadlines, our objective was to get our client operating fully remotely and deliver designs for our platform that can be iterated upon.

Key Interactions

We wanted caseworkers to be able to efficiently add, delete, and edit records pertaining to any manufacturer, program, certificate, and drug. Additionally, they must be able to make changes to the provincial or national availability of any given program.

We incorporated navigation patterns that aimed to expedite the completion of everyday duties for our client's caseworkers.

Breadcrumb Navigation

Breadcrumbs simplify the dashboard navigation experience by reducing the number of clicks required to access higher-order screens from lower tiers of information. Our caseworkers often have to make changes to a company's details editing a program or certificate—breadcrumbs mitigate the need to repeatedly click the “Back” button.

Activation Switches

Manufacturers frequently make changes to the programs and certificates they offer, and will occasionally switch between servicing at the provincial and national levels. Activation switches serve as visual indicators that display the status of company, program, and certificate records.

We also placed activation switches at the list level for certificates to avoid the need for caseworkers to navigate to each individual certificate's property screen to activate or deactivate it. Activating a national-level certificate will automatically disable any active provincial-level certificates, and vice versa.

Next Steps and Takeaways

There are still opportunities to streamline the navigation experience for our dashboard solution.

Features I would explore next include search and filter functions. As the number of registered records within the platform grows, scrolling to find items within lists may become more laborious. The ability to search for and filter items would address such issues by providing our caseworkers direct access to the records they need to work with.

Designs are products of curiosity and collaboration.

A concrete understanding of our client's service in conjunction with our users' expectations with the product were critical to the execution of each design phase. Working on this project taught me that effective designs are created by working side-by-side with people who possess varying domains of knowledge, some of which may not overlap.

We can utilize design to help out our essential industries, even amid a pandemic.

I do not have the resources nor the know-how to help patients with their medical expenses, but a critical element of my role as a designer was to learn about the people who do. The project provided an opportunity to leverage this understanding and contribute to improving accessibility to healthcare services through design.