Value-based care platform

Between mid-2016 and early 2017, I was part of a software team that was tasked with helping a large healthcare organization coordinate its value-based programs. We started the engagement by traveling to the client on a bi-weekly basis so that we could observe them work and discuss their pain points and challenges.

On these visits, we also conducted discovery interviews with a variety of healthcare professionals across the organization. After a few visits and dozens of conversations, we decided to focus on two key problems:

1. Care delivery and utilization management is an extremely demanding activity, made degrees more difficult by the multiverse of burdensome systems and screens staff are required to muddle through.

   Within disparate areas of the organization, we observed office staff using a variety of workflow tools often used at the same time via multiple monitors. Excel spreadsheets served as the duck tape and glue that held everything together. Consequently, staff found their workflow incoherent and disjointed which was compounded by the unsatisfactory usability and reliability of the systems in question. The work was tedious and time-intensive which resulted in overworked, burnt-out employees and fewer patients being cared for.

   How might we streamline care workflows so that staff can achieve their goals while improving job satisfaction and quality of life?
2. Value-based program goals difficult to achieve due to a lack of aggregate, accessible, and real-time progress views.

   Tracking progress daily or even weekly by staff was not readily available which left teams unsure of whether they’d meet their goals. Data sources had to be manually aggregated, scrubbed, and analyzed which was extremely time-consuming and was never good enough to drive decision making. By the time reports were disseminated to the appropriate staff – usually, in the form of printed hard copies – they were out-of-date and no longer relevant or actionable.

   How might we help healthcare pros exchange information in a more timely fashion?

Each design decision the team made was informed by extensive discovery interviews, on-site workflow observations, personas, and weekly user research sessions. Close collaboration with our business partners was critical to co-creating features that addressed explicit and immediate needs. This approach enabled us to quickly deliver solutions to production and into the hands of end users.

The platform helped our partner healthcare organization improve health outcomes for their patient cohorts while reducing overall care costs and ensuring regulatory compliance with value-based programs.