Enhancing medicationorder visibility for patients
Streamlined Juniper’s order system with real-time tracking and clear language, cutting support tickets by 65.5% and boosting patient satisfaction.
Results at a glance
Situation
Juniper, an Australian weight management program for women, combines medical treatments with an app offering health coaching.
Patients struggled with tracking medication orders, contributing to a whopping 40% of total support tickets.
Extended resolution times and a complex system infrastructure frustrated both patients and the Patient Experience team, highlighting the need for a more robust solution.
Discovery
There was a huge volume of support tickets and posts in the patient Facebook community to review for me to better understand the primary challenges that patients were facing.
I then also conducted stakeholder interviews with the support team to better understand from their perspective what types of themes would arise time-and-time again.
I also sat down with the fulfilment team to understand the constraints that we faced in regards to cold delivery and medication compounding to better understand how we could communicate this to patients.
pain points
Patients have little to no visibility over where their medication orders are, making treatment continuity difficult to predict and causing patients distress.
Lack of predictability meant occasionally medication was left outside. Medications require cold storage and can spoil if left in the sun exacerbating distress and frustration.
Patients reach out to PX who would be unable to help patients with more than a best guess based on average delivery times of the shipping provider.
Wrestling legacy systems
To address the problem, we needed to enhance the integration of legacy systems with external logistics and shipping providers, simplify overly technical order statuses into clear, patient-friendly language, and surface this information in an accessible way to give patients confidence that their medication will arrive on time and without complication.
We would then measure success by the reduction in support tickets relating to this issue, and volume of feedback in the patient community.
Making the complicated simple
Collaborating with the Technical Lead, I developed a deeper understanding of the data flow from third-party providers, ensuring consistent patient experiences irrespective of shipping origin or destination and shipment provider, and across Australia and the UK.
I created a flow that adapted our learnings into a uniform interface, balancing the need for quick information delivery and progressive disclosure as to not overwhelm the patient, with greater detail available should they require it to boost patient confidence.
Working with the Content Designer, we translated complex order statuses from various shipping companies into clear, understandable language. Additionally, I addressed logistical challenges when dealing with incomplete or incorrect information from legacy shipment providers or pharmacies.
Results
The redesigned app significantly improved patient satisfaction by enhancing transparency and control over their order processes. It achieved a notable reduction in support tickets related to order inquiries by 65.5%, with a 35% reduction in the first week of launch.
The average handle time for remaining support tickets was also reduced as PX were able to better triage issues by taking advantage of the plain language status changes, improving operational efficiency and halving the cost of resolving each of these tickets by 50%.
Other Eucalyptus projects I am proud of —
Increased patient pickup rates by 11%
Brand: Pilot
Changes in language and UI to make the patient consult experience clearer displayed an 11% increase in pick-up rates, which represents a saving of approximately $33,000 a month in practitioner costs.
Patients also completed their consult dramatically faster, with average consult completion times being 9.54 down to 4.67 hours for the control and variant groups respectively.
The patient experience team has also reported a noticeable drop in patients expressing dissatisfaction with their consult experience, which we hypothesise is a direct result of users better understanding the expectations of the digital consult experience.
Worked with Practitioners to increase efficiency
Brand: All brands
I observed a number of practitioners whilst they conducted consults with patients and designed solutions by refactoring the existing components to make the most important elements within reach.
Whilst the benefits are difficult to quantify, the improvements have had a really strong positive reception from practitioners, evidenced by Sigrid presenting back the improvements to the company globally.
Enabled patients to share fitness data with coaches
Brand: Juniper
Patients in the community had been requesting better ways to share fitness activity with health coaches. This project also allowed for diabetic patients to track their blood glucose, giving health coaches the ability to intervene or provide guidance when glucose spikes arise.
Almost 10,000 patients have added their wearable device to the Juniper app as of August 2024, with the metrics tracked (physical activity, blood glucose, weight fluctuations) now available to practitioners as a segue for intervention, leading to enhanced patient outcomes and program retention.
