Appointment Diary

Client

Medical Diagnostics Provider (2021)

Product team

1x Lead Product Designer and Consultant (me)
1x Lead Product Manager and Consultant
2x Lead Software Engineer and Consultant 
1x Client Product Manager
1x Client Product Designer
2x Client Software Engineer

Opportunity

The Business makes money from the sales of completed patient appointments. Every unfulfilled appointment slot costs the Business money, in lost sales. 

Medical diagnostic centres across Australia had many unfulfilled appointments due to its Managers having to cancel incorrectly booked appointments, or move them to different days. This left appointment slots unable to be fulfilled on such short notice, which meant losses in potential sales for each centre.

Process

We spent time with Managers, through 1-on-1 interviews and by observing them at their centres, to understand why this problem was occurring. 

Managers couldn’t easily get an adequate overview of all the appointments for all the procedure rooms in a given day. This meant that making corrections to problematic appointments in a timely manner was difficult because it wasn’t easy to find them. The information required to make a decision was spread across multiple applications, making the process of checking each appointment cumbersome, time-consuming, and prone to error. The current solution also wasn’t intuitive, and required 4 months of training for new staff to get across.

Outcome

Our solution was a web-based Appointment Diary that allowed Managers to quickly scan for potentially problematic appointments. With the Appointment Diary, they could now: 

• View appointments for multiple procedure rooms (instead of just one), allowing them to quickly get an overview of their day
  
• See important patient and appointment details all in one place (pulling in details from other internal systems)

This improved view allowed Managers to quickly identify which appointments were potentially problematic, so that they could be actioned quicker. Problematic appointments included those that: 

• needed to be confirmed
• were overbooked
• were running behind
• were no-shows and had to be followed up
• were missing important information (e.g. doctor’s referral, and crucial notes such as patient prep info and quoted price)

In addition to giving Managers a better overview of the day by surfacing information crucial to their decision-making process, the Appointment Diary also made it easier for them to action appointments. Managers could do this all from one place, in less time and with less risk of error.

The Appointment Diary was rolled out to a small group of Managers to start with, whose evaluative feedback we used to iterate on the solution. As it evolved and garnered more and more positive feedback from users, the Appointment Diary was then rolled out to all ~4000 users across Australia.

Since going live:

• There are considerably less unused appointment slots, resulting in more sales for the Business 
• Managers have reported spending less time in their day checking for and addressing problematic appointments, freeing them up for their other duties
• New staff members have reported a shorter on-boarding time in learning the tools and processes 
  

Other wins

This project was a great opportunity to showcase the value of Design to a client who didn’t understand it. Our backlog, driven by user feedback, proved to them how an agile team can quickly adjust course to ensure a product maintains high user value. The client has since hired their first Designer, who I worked alongside with and helped upskill in modern Design practices. 

This project was a huge success and has led to future projects with the client, working with them on solving other business problems and upskilling their team members on modern Product Development practices along the way.