Adracare is a Telemedicine and Practice Management company that delivers best-in-class features such as Video Appointments, Patient Records, Patient Billing, and more, for providers of all kinds. Adracare's solution is an all-in-one telehealth and practice management system, specifically designed to help clinics free up administrative burden and give practitioners the tools they need, all in one software.
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““How can we address multiple specialities in medicine and mental health, using the same application?””
Through my 2 1/2 years with the team, I designed 15 of their major features which are were used by over 155,000 providers in 6 countries. My design work to the company’s product, brand, and overall user experience directly contributed to their acquisition in mid 2021 by Well Health. We were a small, scrappy team that came together with the best of our abilities and made a software that helped countless people. The clients we worked with ranged from Physiotherapy, Medicinal Cannabis, Mental Health and Fertility across the globe. So how did we do it?
What was my process for successful UI/UX Design at Adracare?
Personal on site; Hyper-Active user testing
Adracare as a whole made the effort to understand organizations at their heart, having team members actively observe client organizations live.
In order to properly understand the rich and complex clinical environments we were designing for, I made a point to continuously stay in touch with our direct stakeholders, collecting first-hand research from a variety of clinics and stages of the user journey. A great example of this was going to one organization's clinics and sitting with each member of the team for an hour or two, observing points of redundancy or frustration, hearing live accounts and observing moments where the product didn’t live up to expectations.
Including the whole company in user research
As the sole creative personnel on the team, it fell to me to conduct the entire UI/UX responsibilities at times. Instead of doing it all in abstract, alone, I focused on organizing clear processes for success. Whether it was whiteboarding, pain point analysis, user testing or research, I included alternative perspectives from Product, Engineering, Marketing and Business during the ideation processes. This made our research encompass more of our users, but also increased empathy across the team.
To our previous example, something I did that was positively disruptive was bring developers to client organizations, to give them a real sense of where their software lived.
Incorporating technical principles into experiential designs.
Technical validity and security with a telemedicine platform are imperative. I spent countless hours refining and designing a design system that took into consideration antiquated hardware, limited tech skills but also provided powerful systems and tools for any user.
By creating a lightweight, approachable design system focused on flexible workflows and modular components, I ensured that both new and legacy users were using HIPAA/PHIPA Compliant, WCAG accessible tools that felt familiar and useful.
The challenges of designing a world-class telemedicine platform:
Building a telemedicine application that’s dynamic and able to be used by virtually any practitioner was a tall order, especially looking at our competition. Below are some of the key traits our Product Team was able to implement and infuse into our application.
The New Appointment interface allowed users to see their schedule as they book, and allowed for minimal details to prefill calendars quickly
Incorporating multiple specialities into one application
My first challenge as a designer with Adracare was addressing the variety of user groups; Cardiologists, Physiotherapists, Psychologists, Counsellors, and more all needed their own experience.
To address the various workflows, I employed extensive research into mapping out user flows and how each step of the interaction between Administrator, Patient, and Clinician existed, to design momentary experiences that could be used in any order while maintaining functionality. The goal was to ensure that I understood a variety of approaches towards interacting with the tool, to make each core step of the process efficient and easily repeatable. Then, when designing pages I created consistent layouts and information so that no single page was dedicated to one speciality.
How do you minimize the amount of effort it takes to use a software repetitively throughout a workday without losing efficiency?
You may not think about it, but the role of a Medical Office Administrator or Intake Team can be very stressful. Bouncing between application features, looking for information, and having a patient or client on the phone or in person while they do so can be tense. All staff members in a clinic repeating the same actions for each patient, each appointment, each day continuously can be very exhausting.
Overall, the team decided to implement a three-click limit on the number of interactions it would take to get access to core patient information at a moment's notice. By conducting a heuristic evaluation of the application, I mapped out and redesigned user flows (Scheduling, Note Taking, New Patient Creation, etc.) to focus on the baseline understanding that they are repeatable, brief experiences. To minimize clicks, I employed a few methods. By surfacing user data and prefilling relevant content as providers completed different flows, I limited the number of field that needed to individually be filled. Navigation in the application was divided by user permissions and workflows, so that the logical flow was clear without searching for pages or tools.
The Invoicing Modal. A feature that auto-populated details for invoices depending on where in the application they were made. If a user was in the patient’s profile, only patient-centric data filled. If a user was on the appointment they wanted to bill for patient data, appointment data and billing information would prefill instead.
Creating an interface that balanced user interaction and clinical administration was tricky, but the approach I focused on was ensuring that past data was never far from reach.
A common request with video was that some providers wanted to see more of their patient’s faces, so I designed and added a Full-screen / Split-screen button to tuck away features.
How do you design a telemedicine interface that increases efficiency without limiting face-to-face time with patients?
The sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced therapy and many face-to-face interactions online. While providers suffered to maintain stable communications, Adracare saw opportunity to meet the demand.
When faced with this challenge, I saw the unique opportunity to incorporate more efficiency into our workflow. By organizing and synthesizing requirements from active user concerns and patient stories, I was able to map the opportunity of merging the video and medical record components together. Instead of using separate applications, tabs or browser windows, providers were given a collapsible quick-access toolbox; note taking, the patient’s file, asynchronous messaging and more, WITHOUT sacrificing the ability to stay face to face with patients and prevent breaking that connection that therapists, counsellors, or difficult conversations required.
While I worked at Adracare, I spent the time after working on a big release, after learning and growing as a designer, applying everything I had learned to Baseline. Everything I learned I applied to this passion project
While Baseline deals with some non-for-profit research stakeholders, it’s a great example of how I employed my skills learned at Adracare, and unconventional user interface trends from Online Dating, to the world of Dentistry.