Athenahealth Capstone

Adapting athenahealth's patient portal to meet postpartum needs

My Role

UX Research, Ideation, UX Design, Prototyping

Company

athenahealth

Overview

Healthcare is not one-size-fits-all, and the online patient portal experience should reflect that. Informed by the challenges of motherhood and the current direction of Consumer Health at athenahealth, I proposed design solutions to make the patient-facing healthcare portal sensitive to the needs of postpartum mothers. I expanded on the existing portal framework to make it easier for mothers to address their mental health, find relevant and reliable information, and manage healthcare for their families.

Project Process

Allowing for discovery enabled me to properly address the needs of postpartum mothers
In taking a blue-skies approach to this project, it was especially important for me to start broad in both research and design, allowing me to gather as much information and ideate as much as possible, before narrowing the scope to focus in on specific challenges and solutions.

Main Research Questions

TL;DR - What are key challenges during postpartum?

A variety of research tools were necessary to help me fully understand the user and to translate research into design
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Conducting generative interviews via UserTesting.com was essential in understanding the needs of the users and the variety of experiences that women had, from pregnancy through postpartum

I sought to determine:

What are the key challenges of the postpartum experience?
What kinds of technologies are mothers using?
How can we more effectively help new mothers find answers to their questions?
How can we provide support for the mental health challenges that mothers are facing?

Research Method:
15 participants total
Gave birth in the last 3-12 months
5 18-26 years old
5 27-35 years old
5 36+ years old

Research Findings

Research pointed to 4 key postpartum task areas.
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Tracking and Data:
Use sleep tracker patterns to inform schedule
Check O2 & Sleep baby monitors for peace of mind
Check smartwatches for personal health
Put notes in phone to track healthcare issues
Access portal to track vaccinations and appointment adherence

Information Seeking:
Read internet articles or mom-focused forums
Reach out to moms in personal network
Email or message OBGYN with non-urgent questions
Reference weekly newsletters from doctors or hospitals
Consult apps for information specific to newborn’s age

Newborn Healthcare:
Visit pediatrician routinely
Manage insurance coverage and claims
Message, call, or visit pediatrician with questions
Monitor their health and irregularities at home
Find specialists as needed

Managing Mental Health:
Complete self-assessments throughout
Check with doctors to see if it’s more serious
Participate in counseling
Contact doctor if antidepressants are needed

Understanding the Journey & Narrowing the Scope

Focus on information seeking and managing mental health during postpartum

Examining the experience of mothers from pregnancy to postpartum based on feedback from the interviews helped me identify pain points, finding that the most complex pain points exist in the postpartum stage. Looking at the journey map, existing application, and identified task areas, I felt it would be most beneficial for me to focus on the task areas of Information Seeking and Managing Mental Health

Collecting feedback from mothers about their experiences with Postpartum Depression helped me to empathize with an unfamiliar experience and begin to see the challenges for which we should provide more support.

Key moments:
I feel... alone and unprepared
I think... I don't know how I'm going to handle this
I say... how do I know if this is normal?
What I do... isolate myself

Design Implications

Postpartum mothers can be better supported with attentive providers and accurate information

Reliable resources that cover a broad range of postpartum topics are necessary, but there should be customization for users so they feel a level of personal support from their healthcare providers.
Mothers seek advice from other moms online - community building or peer support of mothers in the same healthcare could help navigate users healthcare challenges.
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Further messaging to normalize Postpartum Depression, accompanied by resources to provide clarity or insight into the experience, would help take the burden off mothers who feel alone or unsupported during this time.
Different strategies are preferred by different people - there should not be a one-solution-fits-all approach, and users should be able to select which resources they would like to utilize.

How Might We...

Connect mothers to other mothers for advice about PPD experience?
Customize the information we show to mothers?
Help women tell their doctors how they are feeling?
Ensure women are assessing their postpartum depression throughout their care plan?
Leverage existing messaging infrastructure to provide check-ins?

Wireframing

IA diagrams helped determine how the feature needs and the existing portal should work together. I needed to determine how my new solutions (in pink) would integrate with the existing features of the patient portal (outlined in blue). After revising the information architecture a number of times, I decided that many of the new features should live within a high-level "resources" function that could easily be adapted by to the varying needs of different practices.

Through my sketching and wireframing process, I explored different check-in modalities, ways to present informational overviews and action items on home pages, and organization, content, and information architecture of resources within the portal.

Focusing on Three Feature Areas

Focusing on three specific areas afforded time for iterations and seamless integration.

Personalized Home Pages:

Expanded Resources:

Sensitive Check-ins

& Other Recommendations:

01. Expand upcoming care to include other time- sensitive tasks, such as medication refills and immunizations
02. Address massive insurance challenges for families with a newborn
03. Consider how to help patients easily find therapists/psychologists/psychiatrists to help manage their postpartum depression while inside the portal
04. Add to newborn profile: customize with integration of trackers (sleep and O2 were popular in interviews)

Next Steps

User testing to test resonance or expectations for these designs
Ensure designs adapt to desktop functionality
Consider how tech such as voice assistants could help users quickly access information in articles or complete postpartum check-ins
Consider how added functionalities can be expanded to other conditions (diabetes, injuries, etc.)

Lessons Learned

Be open to research findings guiding design solutions and be ready to pivot if necessary
Plan to incorporate multiple rounds of research or testing into the timeline to narrow down needs
Focus on the bigger picture and give ideas some time to settle before jumping right in
Documenting processes and decisions is important for more than just myself - it helps others to see my thinking throughout the process
Building relationships remotely is challenging - ask for feedback and establish communication