HeyDoctor Custom Queues

project overview

Routing the right visits to the right doctors (2020)

TLDR; Currently our queue controls the "Next Visit" button, but with previous engineering and visual design changes, usage had not improved. The reason behind this is that the button is not taking doctors to where they want to go or expect to go.

The intention of that button was to allow doctors to go to the next visit without needing to go back to a queue and select another visit. To fix this, we created a solution to match doctors' expectations.
‍Note: This was mainly a user experience project with very limited UI designs.

Company

HeyDoctor provides easy, affordable, and secure online medical visits.

Device

Desktop

Team

Product designer (me)
Backend engineer
Frontend engineer
Engineering lead
‍Product manager

the problem

Frustrated doctors were not efficiently accessing the right patient charts

Doctors were defined by user roles instead of by visit priorities. This caused doctors to either have access to charts they couldn't work on and/or didn't have access to charts that they should work on.

This resulted in doctors spending a longer time just to search for patients to treat.

goal

Route doctors to the right patients

1. Improve doctors productivity by increasing visits per hour metric
2. Decrease patient turnaround time (from visit started to visit completed)
3. Enable queue changes without future engineering effort

final designs

Multiple queues for different roles and priorities

research

There's multiple workflows to consider

This problem was discovered in our weekly shadowing sessions with doctors. I noticed that they were not utilizing the "Next Visit" button and inefficiently going back to the visits queue and manually searching and selecting a new patient to treat from a long list of patients.

I interviewed 8 doctors specific to this project—3 full-time doctors and 5 part-time doctors with different licenses: MD/DO, NP, and RN.

top interview findings

👩🏾‍⚕️

The “Next Visit” button did not act as expected

It would take doctors into charts that they couldn’t work on.

👩🏼‍⚕️‍

Multiple types of part-time doctors—more vs less responsibilities

2 common types: Lead and regular part-time doctor

👨🏼‍⚕️

Doctors are making business decisions

Because they are going back to the Visits list, they are deciding which patients are a priority and which are not.

👨🏻‍⚕️

Nurses have too much access in the EMR

Nurses are considered full-time doctors in the EMR, but they are limited in what they can do.

👨🏿‍⚕️

Full-time doctors have too much access

Full-time doctors are entering charts that already have another doctor assigned to it. This is confusing and frustrating for both parties.

design

Designing for the present and future of HeyDoctor

This was tough, but we also had to think about the future of HeyDoctor. In the future, we'll have specialized services that only certain doctors can assist on, like Mental Health or dermatology. This meant figuring out a scalable way to allow certain doctors to see certain charts.

Before

Doctors would scroll through a long list of patients and select their next patient to treat based on what they thought was the best for the business or what was best for themselves (pay-wise).

Content Editor

Admins can create and assign doctors to new queues. The queues are based on a filter and sort system that incorporates visit type, status, assignment, etc.

Now, doctors' queues are not defined by a user role. A doctor can be part of multiple queues and the queue shows the doctor what patients they need to work on.

**The content editor is not customizable from a design standpoint.

Selecting and Switching Queues

Doctors with access to multiple queues will be prompted with a "Select Queue" modal after login.

Once in the queue, doctors can switch queues, if needed, in the account dropdown in the navigation.

results

A queueing system based on different doctors' workflows

Prior to this project, there were a few changes made to the queue that did not involve a strong understanding of how doctors on our platform worked and what their different responsibilities are.

This time around, we had a team focused on doing right by the user and making sure that we covered all the bases so we would not have to go back in to make any other major changes.

next steps

Planning for the future of queues

This project opens up a lot of opportunities for HeyDoctor's EMR and how it operates and connects doctors to patients. In the future, we can use Custom Queues to create specializations, like women's health services (UTI, birth control, etc) can be routed to doctors with experience and preference treating those services.

This feature has been released for a few months now and the response has been great. In our weekly shadowing sessions, doctors are happy that they are seeing the visits that they can treat. Although, one down side is that they are seeing less visits in the queue than before which gives them the perception that the volume has decreased (which is not true).

learnings

Working closely with engineering

This was one of the most complicated, yet fun projects that I've worked on at the company. While it didn't require much UI work, I had to run multiple brainstorming sessions to align engineering, product, and design. We needed to really focus on how our changes would impact the user experience, not just the code. Next time I would bring a few doctors to our brainstorming sessions to provide expertise and insight.