Overview

Dialogue is a healthcare startup that aims to improve the healthcare experience for Canadian patients by making it easier to access healthcare in a convenient, efficient way.

Canadians have free healthcare that covers essential medical services, but getting a diagnosis and treatment is not efficient or wholistic:

• A patient first visits their family doctor, which can take a week and requires them to take time away from work. If a patient doesn't have a family doctor (which is common) they wait hours at a walk-in clinic.
• The doctor then decides if they need a referral to a specialist, where there's usually a several month wait list.
• Health records are scattered between clinics, tools, paper, and are not accessible by the patient or shared amongst medical professionals. Patients are asked about their medical history at every visit and they're expected to remember everything

Our goal was to compliment and enhance the existing healthcare system by making the experience easier, more efficient, and more convenient for patients. Practically this meant:

• Better, easier, convenient access to healthcare professionals that substitutes in-person visits (eg. renewing a prescription, follow-ups, consultations with nutritionists, psychologists, etc.).
• Giving the patient control over their health by having access to their healthcare information.
• Compliance with regulations across Canada, which differ from province to province (each is responsible for the healthcare of its residents).

My role

I was the Design Lead at Dialogue and the first full-time employee. During my time there I was in charge of all design work, making sure I had a thorough understanding of the complex systems we were working in, and ensuring we provided our customers with the best experience.

Design leadership

• Worked with our Engineering, Product, Business, and Medical teams, as well as top level executives, to shape the future vision of our products and driving strategic design work.
• Advocated for our patients and medical staff during design discussions and product planning to prioritize features and experiences that best serve our customers, while maintaining their privacy and safety.
• Maintained a consistent brand experience across all parts of the company, from our products, to our business and sales collateral.
• Created a visual library and component system to streamline our design. It was implemented in collaboration with our engineering team and maintained by me. This allowed for quick iteration and experimentation (we could go from a sketch on paper to a working screen in a couple hours).

Product design

• I designed our products from scratch and was responsible for everything from research, ideation, and problem solving, to the visual design, animations, and implementing UI changes.
• The entire patient experience (iOS and Android apps, and initial web app); I was also heavily involved in our long term product planning and sprint planning.
• The medical teams's experience (desktop and mobile); I was also the Product Manager for this product.
• A web dashboard for employers to provide access to their employees.
• Created a visual library to streamline our design, which was implemented in collaboration with our development team and maintained by me (I generally did a lot of the pixel pushing in the codebase myself).
• Designed 2 versions of our main website (for our initial quiet launch, and after our loud launch).
• Most of marketing and sales collateral including materials for conferences and events (we had a design intern that helped for a few months), and illustrations across all platforms.

Medical Platform

Our medical team takes care of many patients during the day and need to easily navigate between them as well as focus on them during a consultation. They need to have a clear inbox of patients that need attention and to easily switch between them as they chat so they can continue addressing their concerns. While consulting with a patient, they need to have all the context necessary about the patient and the concern they are consulting about.

Simplifying navigation

Allowing medical professionals to focus on their patients and navigate between them easily. An important part of our product is the platform our medical team uses to care for patients. Below is an overview of the latest iteration of that platform.

Main Dashboard

Just like in an emergency room, not every inquiry has the same priority or requires the attention of a doctor. There also isn't a linear or clear process for a patient to flow through, it all depends on what medical attention they need. We needed a clear way of indicating new, important inquiries, as well as where in a process

Common dashboard view for all healthcare professionals. This shows incoming patients who are messaging the healthcare team, those that the health care professional is currently treating, and patients that have had a consultation and waiting for a quick followup.

Patient Chat

We need to cater to two groups of medical professionals:

• Nurses and care coordinators who typically chat with many patients at a time, switching frequently between chats as they receive new responses from patients.
• Doctors and specialists who typically focus on one patient for a long time through a video consultation and only switch once the consultation is over.

For nurses and care coordinators, they would see a side bar on the left allowing them to quickly switch between patients as they are chatting. The side bar here hides the patient profile (see next image), which is something nurses don't need visible all the time since they’re caring for the same patients over a period of several days. The important information they need is the chat in the middle, and summary of care items sent to the patient (such as a care plan after a consultation, prescriptions, etc). If they need to see a patient's profile, they can simply hide the side bar.

For a doctor or specialist, they would be focusing on one patient at a time, which means they don’t need the side bar with the list of patients. The side bar is collapsed (and stays collapsed until expanded again) to show the full patient’s profile. Once they are done with a consultation, they can open the side bar and click on the next patient.

Video Consultation

Finally, when a video consultation is happening, the side bar automatically hides to allow the medical professional to focus on the patient they are talking to.