Referral Workflow

For the Referral designs and workflow, I’ve had the opportunity to lead the team with the supervision of a Principal UX designer. I’ve collaborated with the UX team, Product, UX Research, and Developers to design and launch a Referral Coordinator’s review process. This workflow includes: reviewing a referral, editing or adding information to the referral, sending of the referral, acceptance/rejection of a referral, and how that referral then goes through the scheduling process.

Current Healthcare Product

The Ask

We reviewed any existing research for Patient Administration (PAS) users, and our UX researchers set up additional interviews to investigate the issues and pain points for our users. From there, UX created wireframes and user workflows to fully understand our users perspectives.

The current system requires users to juggle multiple systems and applications, as well as handling information from clinicians and nurses that might not be digitally recorded. This puts a huge strain on our users even though they are expert multitaskers, but the product today turns into a hindrance that requires the user to wait on the system, or even find workarounds that are ‘backdoors’ to get the job done.

The UX Stance

Our biggest focus was to simplify the system and bring as much information to the user so that they don’t have to go find the information themselves. While working on this redesign, we had a few assumptions that we made with our Product team that we built this design off of.

Our system is connected
- All products that our users need to do their job are integrated into one.
Our users wear multiple hats
- A PAS user could be the front desk greeter, scheduler, call center, clinic administrator, and so many more jobs, in one. Our system needs to be able to flex with what they are doing and who they are talking with, on the fly.
They system does the hard work for our users
- Instead of our users needing to fact find, and put the puzzle pieces together themselves, we want the system to do that for them.
Push the work onto the patient to do in the Patient Portal
- To lessen the workload on our users, we pushed for a better Patient Portal experience (a separate team worked on this). With a well built and user friendly Patient Portal, it brings self-service to the forefront, it pushes the more simple tasks onto the patient to complete on their own time.

Wireframes and User Flows

Whiteboard sketches for a call center scheduler

Visionary workflows with pain points, innovations, user goals, and hazards. This was put together with the PAS UX team and UX Researchers

Continuation of PAS workflows and where we could imbed AI innovations into the product

Wireframes in context of the whole PAS workflow

The Outcome

The innovation that UX focused on was having AI step in to gather and bring forward the necessary information for our schedulers to move quickly through their task list, and scheduling appointments quickly.

Our users start in their task list with an AI summary of who is calling in and why. This helps the scheduler to better understand the needs of the patient before they even answer the phone call. The system then automatically fills out the basic information to look for appointments: a preferred provider, location, and appointment type. By putting this burden on the system, it automatically brings forward the best appointment matches that the patient is looking for.

Once the appointment has been scheduled, the system doesn’t stop assisting, AI informs the scheduler of any appointment specific information, day of visit instructions, and the co-pay for the appointment. The scheduler can relay the information easily as well as the information automatically being sent to the Patient Profile for the patient to review.

Lastly, the system assists the user in finishing up the call with AI generated call notes. In a call center today, our users only have about a minute to summarize the call for their records. This allows the user to simply review the notes that were taken for them, with the ability to add additional comments in necessary.

Call center call queue with an AI overview of why the patient is calling in

Patient call has been opened to begin scheduling

Once an appointment has been selected, additional information is needed to complete scheduling

Overview of what was completed on this phone call, with the opportunity to schedule additional appointments

An AI summary of the call notes that the system takes for the user