Capturing & Integrating NPS Insights Into Clinic Management
Medbridge
Product Design Manager (Head)
Privately Owned | Reported to COO
Mission: Improving the lives of patients, providers, and the quality of healthcare.
Impact:
Inherited a small team, managed attrition, and doubled its original size while leveling up skill sets
Patient GO app received 4.6 stars from 9,000+ iOS & Android reviews
Enterprise sales of Healthcare NPS Index platform closed on 100% of pre-development commitments
Sections
Design Challenge (< 1 min )
Patient Experience (<1 min)
Clinic Management Platform (1.5 mins)
User Research (< 1 min)
Key Learnings (1.5 mins)
Design Challenge
Medbridge is the industry leader for physical therapists’ continuing education and the exercise programs they assign to patients during recovery. Patients access their recovery program in the Medbridge GO! application, which is now an industry standard.
In 2016, the PT industry was in the midst of consolidation, and regional managers had quickly become an archetypal role in the industry. These managers had P/L responsibilities in a world where positive patient outcomes were on the verge of driving insurance reimbursements, yet they had little insight into the actual experience of patients at their clinics.
The opportunity was straight-forward—capture patient feedback and design a platform to present quantitative and qualitative data to all levels of clinic management.
Patient Experience
Our ideation frames were: “How might we create an unobtrusive NPS ask of patients?” & “How might we augment NPS to capture qualitative feedback as quant?”
Frame #1
We decided that the ask would conditionally display in the GO app after the patient had gone through at least two progressions of their rehab program.
Frame #2
We hypothesized that the explicit interactions between a patient and the clinic—whether it be non-existent parking or a consistently amazing physical therapist—were the foundation to their overall score, and may be as valuable to clinic management as the NPS itself.
By adding customizable one-click patient experience tags to the NPS question, we could now provide clinic management immediately actionable quantitative insights.
Management Platform
As a manager begins their day we inundate them with context—a 90 day trailing view of NPS and patient experience tags with scores representing discrete levels of satisfaction.
We designed the experience to allow for permutations of organization models—both in terms of management hierarchy and which patient experiences tags would be in play.
Comparisons help managers get a sense for how their operations are performing compared to other groups.
Locations - Top 10 clinics' scores provided regional managers with comparative summaries or clinic-specific details; clinic managers had access only to top-level scores for gamification.
Providers - At best, scores had tacit correlation to provider performance; NPS focused on brand recommendation, not providers. Our clinic tags captured provider scoring specifics, which addressed their NPS concerns.
Body Region - I felt that using NPS to gauge treatment of body regions related to provider areas of focus seemed problematic in the insurance payout outcome-based world.
The bottom third of the display presented all qualitative feedback by patients, providing in-depth context to quantitative scoring, which is particularly useful when trying to get to the root of the matter.
We were conscious about not fostering workplace environments where providers might be reprimanded by management for low clinic scores that had nothing to do with the care providers gave their patients. The addition of one-click feedback added richness to NPS data.
Rounding out the platform was a simple, yet effective onboarding feature and an elastic search function that restricted available data to the operational areas each particular user owned.
User Research
The investment in a user research capability within a B2B organization can be a difficult sell.
As for testing the usability of our solution, we leaned into internal tests with Medbridge employees who had zero exposure to the initiative, which helped us discover succinct interface issues that we were able to quickly fix.
We couldn’t arrange a proper set of interviews with either physical therapists or management, so we pursued insights as situations arose. A routine shadowing of PTs in their clinics led to our insight into concerns of being tied to negative clinic scores.
Key Learnings
Leading Design in a B2B for the first time was a steep learning curve.
Sales drives everything, and everything is viewed through the lens of sales. Indexing towards quality thinking and craft within a company that is used to shipping at 50% of my definition of a necessary investment in product design is a friction-packed dance towards alignment. I’m more than willing to adapt how I pursue quality, but without previously experiencing this type of cultural constraint, it was difficult to recognize how deep I needed to be in lock-step with our front-line folks.
In-house Agile teams can be a hit or miss
My previous experience with Agile was as a remote design consultant, integrating my studio team into their cadence. Medbridge was my first in-house experience. They operated in three week engineering sprints, with the first week dedicated to planning. I negotiated Design prototypes as direct input to the development of user stories. Design operated outside of the 3 week sprint unless we were consulting a build. Overall we had the room to iterate artifacts and hold conversations.
Politics are real; relationships are the solution
I left the corporate world in 2005 because I couldn’t navigate the politics of leading the design of a client-centered platform from the bottom of an engineering organization. I spent the following ten years as a design consultant, focusing on proposals, strategy, and our solutions. While I developed strong relationships, it’s not the same as relationship building from within an organization. Medbridge was difficult. I had a hard time understanding where I fit in with the founding culture. Many lessons learned, particularly that brilliant work doesn’t go as far as connecting with people.