Caretracker
Designing PBACO’s patient tracking platform to help providers manage care for over 250,000 patients.
Healthcare
B2B
End-to-end Design
PBACO is a population health startup that helps physicians to provide better care for their patients and reduce their healthcare expenses. With the company's rapid growth, their methods of managing members and patients are struggling to keep up. As a result, thousands of their physicians' high-risk patients are not being routinely seen, leading to untreated chronic illnesses and higher medical bills. There is an urgency to solve this problem as the ACO prepares to transition from a Fee-for-service model to a Value-based care model.
Company
Palm Beach Accountable Care Organization (PBACO), a population health startup
Team
Designer (me)
Engineers x4
Product Manager
Chief Information Officer
Contributions
Research, userflow mapping, wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, documentation, customer support, internal support
Design Impact
250k
Patient lives managed via Caretracker
15k
Average weekly actions after first 12 months
$1.2m
Savings achieved after first 12 months
Research Findings
Early Project Work
Before I joined the project, the management team had difficulty getting stakeholder approval. Their proposed ideas only reflected internal workflows and didn't incorporate input from physicians and their office staff, who would be the primary users.
Early Caretracker mockup created by the management team
If we were going to get this project approved, we would have gain a deep understanding of our targeted users. I conducted several interviews with leadership, department teams, physicians and office staff in order to get a better idea of their workflows. Out of those conversations emerged the following themes:
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In-person meetings to deliver and retrieve paper reports were causing major bottlenecks in tracking providers and patients.
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Care providers felt overwhelmed with workload requested by the ACO and often fell behind or ignored acting on actionable reports.
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Methods of internally tracking patient outcomes were manually intensive (think hundreds of massive excel spreadsheets)
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Lack of robust patient tracking meant that patients were falling through the cracks by not being scheduled, seen or followed up with.
Now that we knew what we needed to focus on, it was time to create a solution that would fit our business and user needs.
Planning
Users
There are three principle user groups that the Caretracker needed to accomodate:
Workflow
We wanted to create a closed loop system, meaning that patients who are put into the software are systematically followed-up with until after their office visit can be verified. To achieve this, we created three categories to separate patients into: open, pending and closed, as seen below.
We used the general workflow as a blueprint when determining the interface. By necessity, the overall workflow increased in size and scale in order to accommodate the complexities of patient scheduling and tracking.
Features
Reducing bottlenecks with real-time list of high-risk patients
Paper reports were replaced with a system that told practices which of their patients needed to be scheduled and followed-up on based off of real-time data sources. This eliminated bottlenecks associated with physically delivering reports and also enabled ACO staff to remotely assist practices with scheduling and tracking.
Preventing patient leakage with closed-loop system
Patients are handled through a system of scheduling, follow-ups and confirmations to make sure that each patient reaches each step of the process and doesn’t leave the cycle of care until fully resolved.
Built-in Management features
Built-in analytics empowered ACO employees, office managers and physicians to keep track of both their patients and the staff assigned to input work on the Caretracker.
Data Upload functionality
Data upload functionality enabled ACO employees and practices to upload patient rosters into the Caretracker using a secure, HIPAA-compliant method. This reduced the chances of PHI leakage through unsecured channels.
Approval!
After several iterations and countless meetings with various stakeholders, I was able to develop the Caretracker design to a point where it gained the approval of our ACO staff, providers and developers. This gave the CIO what they needed to get the green light from the CEO to begin development of the project.
Reflections
This was the largest project I had worked on to-date and I was really grateful that we were finally able to bring this to production and see it have a visible impact on getting more of our high-risk patients scheduled. Our initial production version wasn't perfect, but it was a vast improvement over the previous way of doing things, and it is something that will continue to improve with future updates.
Things I would've done differently
I would’ve incorporated user testing much earlier into the project. A few weeks at the end is very little time to identify and fix all of the issues that could come up, and this contributed to the project's delayed timeline. Of course, it's impossible to predict absolutely everything in the planning phase, but doing so would've saved a lot of time and met more of our user's needs from the get go. Nevertheless, these were valuable lessons that I've since incorporated into subsequent projects.
