Designing new intake process
for a mental health clinic
Intake and onboarding design for Virgil
Virgil is a mental health treatment company working with a number of disorders ranging from addiction treatment to depression.
My Role
Lead Product Designer
Input
User Research Service Design
UI & UX Design Prototyping
Industry
B2C Health tech
Date
2021
CHALLENGE
High patient churn and lots of intake team errors
Virgil's processes were complex, multi-layered and mostly manual. Multiple departments were working simultaneously to intake and onboard patients. They were communicating updates in a dedicated Slack channel, making it close to impossible to track the relevant changes in time. It lead to frequently lost messages, delays and errors in patient profiles, high operational costs and as a result high client churn. For the patients, it resulted in slow response times, delayed treatment, and frustration.
I was challenged with an opportunity to automate, speed up and optimize business processes of the company.
TL;DR
- I identified the biggest gaps in business processes of patient intake;
- I led collaborative workshops to shape solutions to these problems;
- Designed a new intake and onboarding flows leading to less errors, faster user activation and lower churn.
RESEARCH INSIGHTS
“Wait, you can’t treat me and you tell me this just now?“
Patients were often disqualified late in their intake journey. Each team – clinical, operations, finance and admission – was in charge of their own "qualification" on the different stages of the user journey. As a result a business could lose hundreds of dollars on intake of patients that we could not treat.
“Does anybody know if this patient paid?”
Data was stored in Slack conversations and Google Sheets. Payment and insurance objects were updated manually which was often inaccurate and not timely. Even more, sales often offered discounts and it was hard to track it leading to intrasparent and unpredictable revenue outcomes.
“It’s a second week of communications and I'm still waiting to start my therapy”
Patients had to wait until they get call back from us, answer clinical questions, receive their invoice and pay, we approve this payment and then contact them to schedule the treatment. Scheduling treatment was also manual which made the process even longer.
SCOPE
Mapping the future collaboratively
After collaborative practices with heads of different dept and mapping our core issues, I ended up with a list of requirements. A few core ones:
- As a user, I should be able to know if I can be be treated by a company asap;
- As a user, I should be able to verify if I am covered by the insurance ad pay out of pocket if needed by myself;
- As a user, I should be able to start treatment right after payment.
The flows of patient intake created in collaboration with ops, finance and clinical teams
DESIGN EXPLORATIONs
New business flows translated in streamlined user experience
I have explored a few options of the user flows to find the balance between the information we need and the amount of data users will want to share early on. I was collaborating on a daily basis with our internal teams to make sure our business processes are changed accordingly.
After a number of tests of our intake flows with the users, we decided on the optimal number of questions in the questionnaire and mapped edge cases.
Some of the intake flows I designed to optimize our intake process
Ready, set, release!
The final flows were designed in mind with the specifics of different programs we offered, disqualification creterias, geo and insurance coverage aspects.
One of the intake flows for one of the programs we offered
Impact
- time from request till first paid session decreased by 4 days,
- increased user activation by 130% due to optimized booking flow and provider-patient flows,
- increased efficiency and lowered workload of the internal team.
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