Reimagined the patient experience and operational workflow for a mobile dental service looking to roll into new markets
The Opportunity
Mobile care service is a niche but growing category due to the convenience and affordability it offers – both for service providers and their customers. 6 years ago in Louisville, Kentucky, at the forefront of the mobile care movement, Dr. Kwane Watson had taken the low-cost, high-accessibility mobile care model and applied it to his mission to provide dental care to underserved communities.
The problem? Appointment scheduling and processing technology already present headaches of their own, but add to that moving targets as appointment locations, and the logistics get tricky fast. Dr. Watson had prototyped his own solutions for consumer-facing appointment setting and back-end admin scheduling, but both sides needed some user experience TLC before hitting the gas on expanding into new markets.
User Journey Mapping
Our goal was to reimagine the patient intake experience in a way that was consistent with the Kare brand and vision and set up patients and the Kare team for a delightful, helpful experience from check-in to checkout.
To do this, we mapped out the current user journey to build understanding and empathy for our key personas: patients and operators. We came away with two key takeaways:
This was a manual, time-consuming process that would need to be optimized for operational efficiency at scale.
The scheduling tool needed to become more intelligent if it was going to account for the time and costs associated with serving multiple remote areas.
With these needs in mind, we ran through a series of sprints, exploring potential solutions and outlining various workflows before synthesizing the best direction to optimize the user experiences.
Product Design
Due to the special nature of a mobile appointment business, we needed to incorporate a few special features that would support Kare Mobile’s evolving operations. We began designing the full fidelity experience for the enhanced versions of Dr. Watson’s prototypes. During this process, we also developed a new interface design language that would ensure all user touch points would be consistent with Kare Mobile’s recent brand refresh to add polish to the user experience.
Admin Scheduler
Patient Scheduler (New and Returning)
Product Development + Implementation
With all the design details in place, we developed a prioritized sprint schedule of all build work for the new experience. This ensured that even the highly technical work, such as integration with their existing EMR system and scheduling database, didn’t lag or lose momentum.
In the spirit of providing a smooth user experience from the outset, we conducted extensive functional testing to stress test the new technologies before deployment, including controlled testing with a limited sample of active patients and operators. Once the product was stable, we deployed to their entire network of vans serving several geographic regions in Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Georgia.
Technology Used for Implementation
