Care Model 101
02/10
When architecting a care model, you have to think about many diverse users such as providers, clinical operators, the internal admins, clients, and, of course, the patients. That’s one of the reasons why care models are so hard. We don’t have the luxury of simply building an app for one user type. We have to build at least two wildly different tech products to ensure, at minimum, both patients and providers can give and receive care. And, as you can imagine, managing 2,000 patients in a panel is far more complex than managing my own pneumonia.
Exceptional patient apps are dead stupid simple. It’s an exercise of saying no to what apps could do vs. saying yes to what they should do. Patients need simplicity because managing their health is, nine times out of ten, a side project amongst all their other life projects. Here’s an example of how we designed this at Sherpaa:
There are many questions to consider when designing for patients. An example of a few of them are:
- How do potential patients learn about the service?
- How do we educate patients about their condition?
- How do we design features for patients? What are objectives and drivers?
- How does the potential patient create an account?
- How does the patient learn how to use the app and how it’s organised?
- How do we know if patients believe our app is easy to use?
- How does the patient first engage with their humans in the service?
- How do we build trust with patients over time?
- How do patients know what roles do and what they’re for?
- How can patients communicate with providers?
Creating a simple, easy to understand patient experience is ridiculously hard and entire companies with just this one kind of user struggle to do so. At the same time, designing primarily for the providers is mission #1. If you give superpowers to the folks working behind the scenes via easy to use provider tech and processes, the patients see magic.
Next: The Care Team Experience ⇢