Skin Laundry: Electronic Medical Record App
Overview
Skin Laundry is a medical company providing laser facials to address a wide variety of skin concerns. Because of the medical-grade services Skin Laundry provides, first-time guest are required to be approved by a Nurse Practitioner or Physicians Assistant prior to receiving their initial treatment. Skin Laundry’s previous EMR platform was not user friendly or intuitive. It required telemedicine providers to be on-call and constantly available to approve new clients. This process was inefficient, expensive, and inconvenient. Our goals as a business and tech team in updating the EMR program were to reduce approval costs for first-time clients, decrease approval time for Telemedicine providers, and drive efficiencies to scale business while cutting operational expenses. This ultimately required the development of separate and distinct platforms for physicians, nurses, and clinic staff.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Timeline
6 Months to launch
January 2023 - July 2023
Prototypes
Mobile & Tablet
Tools
Figma & Maze
Telemed Provider View - Approval Flow
Front of House and Nurse Views
Doctor View - Bulk & Individual Chart Signing
Role
In conjunction with my Senior Product Designer, I spearheaded the initial discovery phases of the EMR project, which included mapping out current user flows, collecting data from the medical operations team, and creating wireframes and high-fidelity visual designs for the new native app. In addition to designing the app, I also helped lead QA, partnering closely with product and engineering.
Discovery & Research
Initial data from the business, medical operations, and data analytics teams, indicated that the company incurred costs of $14 for the approval of each new client by medical providers. It was also estimated that the providers spent approximately 7 minutes on each new approval. Based on this information, we surveyed the telemed team for feedback regarding the current EMR platform and client approval process. The providers rated the then-existing platform an NPS of 4/10. Accordingly, we endeavored to develop a new app that was more user-friendly based on provider feedback and more efficient to meet our business KPIs. In addition to the survey, we conducted research by interviewing our in-clinic employees, RNs and our front of house staff to elicit additional qualitative feedback to inform the design process. Please see below for views of the platform our providers used prior to rebuilding this app.
Design & Implementation
Working closely with our head of engineering and product managers, we elected to build this app in React Native. We had learned through our research that the telemed team and MDs needed an app optimized for mobile devices enabling the approval of new clients ‘on the go’. We also had to consider that optimizing the view for iPad, as our RNs and front of house employees use iPads in the clinic. The new designs reduced the number of clicks for telemed providers from 10 to 2, allowing them to approve clients in minutes. It also allowed them to view client photos more clearly (the key to approving a client) while concurrently viewing a client’s medical information on the same screen. For MDs, we provided the ability to either bulk sign charts or review individual charts based on specific contraindications or otherwise indicated by the RN. Additionally, we added a novel feature which allows the medical providers to communicate within the app via a comment section rather than communicating via text or email regarding a specific chart. Lastly, we added a reject functionality which allows MDs to ‘reject’ specific charts that failed to meet the applicable criteria. Please see below for the user flow that maps out the app for all provider types.
Analysis & User Research
Once our designs were built into prototypes, we user tested with our intended end users. We used Maze as our testing platform to capture data we needed from our NP and PAs. 95% of our telemed providers felt that the experience was far more intuitive and smoother. For our MDs, we tested the prototype by conducting a live moderated test. Our MDs also felt that the new experience gave them an ‘all access view’ into a client’s chart that they had been missing. They provided us with key insights which allowed us to make design changes resulting in a more effective and useful product. Please view the telemed provider prototype here and the MD prototype here.
Refinement
Based on our user testing feedback, we refined the original prototype designs to include additional information and features requested by our end users. This included simplifying the queue of charts (dashboard screen) so that providers could view more charts on a single page. Medical charts were improved to include all notes about the client, from all provider types, detailed medical history, and past treatment history for doctors to review. Clearer functionality was added for MDs in the notes section to facilitate efficient communication and decision making. These changes aimed to improve the overall workflow of the app and facilitated use by multiple providers and front of house employees.
Performance Data
In the process of building the app, we added analytics and tracking to provide additional metrics. Those metrics show that providers now spend less than one minute on approving a new client for treatment following notification that they have a pending chart to review. The cost per approval has decreased from $14 to $7. Additionally, the time required for the clinic to request a new client for approval has decreased by 50% using the front of house view within the app. With the analytics that were added to the app, we are now able able to capture new data, including the exact amount of time required to approve a new client, the percentage of clients who are not approved, and the reasons for which a client would not be approved for treatment. Due to the successful integration of this product, first time clients grew from 100 to 300 per day using the same size workforce of 6 telemedicine providers and 2 MDs.
Conclusions
The EMR app project scaled across 50 clinics and has over 300 users today. This project was challenging and rewarding, as we achieved and surpassed our business goals of decreased cost and time per approval— both by approximately 50%, ultimately generating a cost savings of 1.2M. Through well-researched and thorough design, we created a streamlined and intuitive product for our medial providers which is now integral to the Skin Laundry business.