Forward Health is an innovative healthcare tech company providing SaaS for remote allied health professionals. The product manages indirect patient tasks, like scheduling, to improve productivity and reduce non-billable units. As an early stage start up, I was the only designer on a small collaborative team.
Through initial research, I discovered common pain points around tasks that are considered indirect or non-clinical in nature. There are areas of waste that impact caseload management, revenue, and work-life balance. From there, I created personas to capture the mindsets of clinical team members from both a clinical and business perspective. These personas were instrumental in determining high priority features for the product.
Therapists are working off the clock to finish notes and scheduling tasks
Indirect tasks are generally non-billable and therefore non-reimbursable
Therapists report lower quality of life and reduced job satisfaction rates
Jack is a clinical manager. He is responsible for overseeing the agency’s daily activities, including compliance and operational expenses.
He is noticing that the majority of his therapists are having trouble meeting recommended productivity standards. There is also an uptick in non-billable units per patient.
His goals are to help his therapists streamline non-treatment time and increase reimbursement by optimizing skilled interventions.
Nadia is a clinician managing a full time caseload, including both evaluations and treatment.
Lately, she’s had to work off the clock to get her notes and scheduling done in a timely manner. Nadia is beginning to feel burn out setting in and she’s often too tired to enjoy her life outside of work.
Her goals are to streamline and consolidate therapy tasks into one convenient platform.
After research and discovery was completed, we had a clearer understanding of product direction and strategy. There is opportunity for duality with this product from both patient care and business stand points. The initial version will primarily tackle therapy needs but there will be scaffoldings in place to support business functions later on. The overall goal is to streamline therapy tasks to improve productivity, reduce non-billable units, and facilitate the highest level of patient care.
Provide multiple touch points for important tasks
Create standardized components where possible
Mimic the natural flow of therapy
The calendar addresses several high priority tasks including creating new visits and session prep, which often overlap. Each visit type has an assigned color and filter in the right sidebar. Therapists can customize the calendar view by visit type(s) to make scheduling and session prep easier to manage.
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Therapists have different options to add visits for patients depending on where they are in product navigation. Visit details are easily inputted through a modal short form the renders on whatever page the therapist is viewing. While viewing the calendar, therapist can hover over a specific time block to schedule a visit. The date and time information populates automatically.
Patient information is organized to facilitate a thorough but efficient chart review process. Generally, therapists target a specific set of information to prepare for patient visits. This information was prioritized and consolidate where possible. There are also cross-discipline collaboration features baked into the design.
Cross discipline teams are able to easily track services for a patient as part of the chart review process, but also stay in the know about specific skilled interventions without navigating to a new page. It's a time saver and improves the quality of care a patient receives.
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Notes are divided into a series of accordion cards that mimic the natural flow of therapy sessions. These components help therapists stay organized and also promotes bedside documentation for better productivity and intervention accuracy. Special consideration was placed on standardizing documentation for elements that are consistent across patients.
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We provided smarter and faster options to limit free typing in the documentation pages. For example, there are thousands of eligible codes for billing. Filters and strategic content organization allow therapists to locate appropriate codes must faster and with less headache. Accordion cards are also utilized to select standardized ratings and patient assessment information.
Forward Health would benefit from usability testing to evaluate the MVP. Although this product is in the early stages, it is scalable within the allied health world. It would be interesting to explore an admin or clinical manager interface to make a more comprehensive product.