Ontada
Patient Support Tools
Ontada Health's patient support tools improves online healthcare assistance. Designed for patient support administrators, these tools facilitate quick patient searches and efficient resolution of account-related issues. By offering easy access to patient health records (PHR), they significantly improve the level of support for cancer patients enabling administrators to provide timely and effective help.
The Challenge
Users of My Care Plus, including both internal support team and external practice administrators, struggled with the platform's outdated interface and unorganized information architecture, resulting in complex and less effective workflows.
These challenges resulted in operational delays for the users, slowing down critical tasks such searching for patients in MyCarePlus during support calls, helping them access their patient portal accounts or finding information from patient health records (PHR).
The Solution
In redesigning the admin tools of My Care Plus for OntadaHealth, I enhanced the user interface to make it more intuitive and efficient. The redesign included an improved patient search process and a more user-friendly health record interface.
This approach led to high user satisfaction, as indicated by UMUX-Lite scores of 4/5 and 5/5, and estimated to a 30% reduction in the duration of support calls, greatly improving operational efficiency.
We interviewed internal and external users of My Care Plus to understand their needs, goals and challenges
"…sometimes patients only know their doctor's name and not the name of the facility the doctor's practicing at."
"…probably be helpful to have the support manager tool within the activity manager section."
"…interactive view of the patient health record will be more useful than downloading a PDF."
Challenges in locating patient profiles
Since patients usually only know the doctor's name they go to, finding patient profiles via the search is difficult since admins are required to select a practice first.
Unintuitive patient search feature
Separate and dislocated Search leads to a cumbersome process to find patients, slowing down assistance and increasing support call durations.
Confusing layout of patient health records (PHR)
Accessing patient records as downloadable PDFs can be restrictive, less user-friendly and unsecure for patient data. PDF layouts are confusing with repeated information.
No visibility of a patient's caregiver
Having no information about a patient's caregiver leads to longer support calls because a patient needs to verify a caregiver's identity before support can be provided.
Using the responses gathered from the user interviews, I took a more in-depth look at the platform itself, and conducted a heuristic evaluation with the goal of understanding the features of My Care Plus and identify key usability issues with the existing admin tools.
Key issues found from Heuristic Evaluation
Complex User Flows
Patient search required multi-steps and locating features was a challenge due to scattered placement of links and CTAs.
No System Status
The platform had really no indicators for page loads or button actions and suffered from extremely slow response and load times.
Design Inconsistency
There were a variety of buttons with differing designs and inconsistent terminology in the CTAs and links.
Oncology support administrators struggle to efficiently locate and access essential patient information in My Care Plus, such as patient profiles and health records. This difficulty not only prolongs support calls, leading to administrator and patient frustration, but also negatively impacts the overall quality of patient care and support.
Now it was time to think about who were were designing for. Through user interviews, we identified two types of administrators that use admin tools in My Care Plus - Super admins and Practice admins.
Super Admin
Meet Jasmine, working at McKesson as a patient portal support specialist for My Care Plus users such as patients, caregivers and practices.
Jasmine access to all practices and patients in the database.
She select a practice every time she wants to search for a patient.
She's able search for patients using their email address in Support Manager.
She helps both practice users and patients with account related issues.
Practice Admin
Meet Aaron, working at Odessa Oncology as a patient coordinator who provides administrative support to patients within his practice.
Aaron manages patients registered under his practice only.
He cannot search for patients in multiple locations of his practice simultaneously.
He cannot search for patients using their email address due to lack of email search feature.
He cannot reset password for his account without assistance from Super users.
Next we needed to develop an understanding of what features was important. I worked with the PM to write user stories. Keeping Jasmine and Aaron in mind, we decided on three key user stories to further develop.
"I want to search for patients without selecting a practice first so that I can find them quickly and easily in the database."
Patient search required multi-steps and locating features was a challenge due to scattered placement of links and CTAs.
"I want to view patient health records in an interactive view so that I can easily help patients find information in their portal."
The platform had really no indicators for page loads or button actions and suffered from extremely slow response and load times.
"I want to view who a patient has assigned as a caregiver so that I can provide better assistance to caregivers."
There were a variety of buttons with differing designs and inconsistent terminology in the CTAs and links.
Using the user stories as a guide, we sketched various ideas and selected the most promising ones to build our core wireframes focusing on two core features.
Patient Search
Patient Health Record View
Patient Search
The landing page for support tools will allow admins to search for patients using various identifiers.
Patient health record view
Admins can see a patient's health record in an interactive view for easy navigation.
Caregiver information
Added the missing information about caregivers so admins can quickly identify them during calls.
After gathering feedback from the Ontada team, we updated the wireframes to improve the overall experience and created a prototype to test with out users
We conducted remote user tests with 3 users and validated the designs using the UMUX-Lite scale. Here is what the users scored:
4 out of 5
✅ System meet my requirements.
5 out of 5
✅ This system is easy to use.
30%
✅ Estimated reduction in call duration.
Here is what our users had to say about the new experience:
Revamped Patient Search
"Ability to search for patients across all practices is helpful because a lot of times patients call in and they may not remember the full name of the practice that they visit."
Interactive Patient Health Record
"To present PHR in this way, I think that's going to be really helpful when trying to help the patient if they need help navigating through the portal or showing them where something is."
Search Filters
"That's a good list of filters, and if we can keep all of this information, I think that would be very helpful."
Search Results Table
"The table and the information included in the columns displayed in the table, that all looks good."
How do we make it easier and quicker for users to find patients?
Practice Users
Practice users will land on a page that is specifically dedicated to their practice only. From here, practice users can search for patients within their practice only while having the ability to see patients across all their locations.
How do we make it for users to view patient information and take necessary actions to resolve account related issues?
How do we make it for users to view patient health records without the necessity of downloading PDF files with sensitive patient data?
Learning the importance of team dynamics and cross-collaboration
This project highlighted the importance of teamwork across different functions and the need for early alignment. Faced with challenges in user recruitment and testing, we adapted by conducting in-depth walkthroughs with users instead.
Looking ahead, I plan to engage a wider range of healthcare admins for richer insights and implement improved user testing strategies. Additionally, bringing back caregivers under patient details would significantly enhance the user experience since users expressed the importance of this information when identifying patients or verifying patient caregivers during support calls.