2022
Private Healthcare Web & Mobile App
Building a Seamless Booking System to Speed Up Patient Referrals
Within the private healthcare industry, it can be difficult for clinicians to refer their patients to other doctors within the practice.
For this project, the client requested a responsive mobile and web application that would solve the aforementioned issue, while also accounting for project growth where patients would eventually track their appointments and manage results.
The Problem
Our client is a well-established private healthcare provider with 250+ clinicians. Each clinician has their own secretary who manages their availability and patient records, which was causing confusion and delays when patients needed to be referred to another doctor.
The client wished to remove the multiple avenues and steps to their existing process, by allowing clinicians themselves to easily refer and book appointments with other clinicians in just a few minutes.
My Solution
The clinician availability structure was the primary focus to ensure a smooth booking process. After a discussion with the client and development team, we decided the best approach for a seamless transition for the large clinician base was to connect to their existing appointment system via an API.
Appointments can be booked up to 8 weeks in advance, so I designed a custom calendar to allow the user to see all available dates at a glance. Due to the structure of the calendar system, we were then able to display a shorthand tag (such as 'Today', 'Next Week', etc.) on each clinicians profile of their next available date, to speed up the booking process further.
The stakeholders key focus was ensuring the homepage was as easy to navigate as possible for all clinicians, who all had varying experiences with technology. Food delivery apps were the main inspiration here, as after conducting research with 40 key members of their team of different ages and backgrounds, over 80% of users mentioned they appreciated the ease of use of apps such as Deliveroo and Just Eat.
From this research, I tested a range of these apps to understand the practices the users preferred the most, and began planning how this could be transferred to the healthcare industry.
I proposed the below homepage, where clinicians were grouped by their specialities and nearest availability. The results on this page would shuffle based on the users most common interactions with specific clinicians, services and specialities, to provide a personal experience to each user.
