Athenahealth: Scheduling Suite

Project: Scheduling Suite Redesign

Target User: Practice managers, Front desk staff, schedulers, and patients

Goal: Combine existing scheduling products into one open platform and one design system

Role: UX, Visual Design, and Strategy

We had three products with similar functions but all built on completely different tech stacks. I worked closely with another designer to create a flexible framework that would accommodate the needs of our different users.

Common Framework Modules

Modules: We are working on a system that will be flexible. This includes a Filter/Search, Availability, Patient Information, Patient Booking, and Patient Confirmation module.

Role: Since Practice and Patient Scheduling have combined I now work with another designer. We share the design, and research responsibilities. I work solely with the patient product owner on the strategic growth of Patient Scheduling. Our team is expecting to double this year as we grow.

Approach: The first step we are taking is to rebuild the practice and patient applications as one product. To accommodate the future growth of scheduling, as well as the needs of the very different users and use cases we are modularizing the product into its core workflows. This will afford us great flexibility as we move forward.

The Beginning

Pivot

The practice scheduling product was spinning up for a alpha with one of our larger enterprise clients but didn’t have the featured needed for a scheduler at a call center. This would make the scheduler switch back and forth from their normal scheduling software and ours based on what the patient was looking for. This was one of the downfalls of the previous direct scheduling products so when an opportunity came up for us to pivot to a product where an urgent care could directly book into an orthopedic office we jumped on it.

Site Visit

To kick start this new product in which we had a very tight timeline we went on a site visit to both the ortho and urgent care office. While at the office I made some sketches of the environments of our users.

Blueprint/Readout

After our site visit we created a service blueprint as a way to capture the journey of a patient from an urgent care to orthopedic office. Then we gathered all of the stakeholders in our office for a readout of the research.

Readout

Scheduling User Apps

As we worked to get the urgent care to ortho off the ground the patient scheduling, and practice scheduling teams combined with the intent of creating one common framework of separate modules that could meet our current need and our future plans to grow as well.

An App map was created to show the entire practice scheduling experience and then to highlight what we would be focusing on for the MVP.

This was a helpful tool for a couple of reasons:

allowed us to see the experience from a 20,000' ft view
allowed us to align and iterate on the MVP components
helped tell the story as to where we were going now with the MVP and where we would be going in the future.