Product Designer at Opencare
User Research, User experience design, Interaction design, Interface design

Reimagining Instant Book at Opencare

Context

Opencare
Founded in 2012, Opencare’s vision is to change the way patients and health providers interact. We are currently laser focused on creating amazing experiences for patients to find the right dentist, and to bring them together using a streamlined appointment booking platform. We see this as a gateway to simplifying all interactions between patients and dental practices; ultimately making health care more personable, approachable and accessible.

Instant Book
Using custom integrations, our Instant Book feature automatically looks for available time slots in the dental practices scheduling software and shares them with Opencare patients who then request an appointment.

The Challenge

To reimagine Instant Book, user research was quintessential. The complex workflows of the multiple user types and their interactions with one another needed to be laid out in detail to identify pain points. In order to achieve that, I gathered as much as I could from our customers to understand their mental model of Instant Book and the challenges they were facing.

Mapping the Flow to Find Pain Points

I mapped out the current scheduling flow for dental practices with and without the Instant Book feature and identified pain points 🔥.

Qualitative User Interviews

I conducted a series of qualitative user interviews with several of our dental practices (US & CA) to discuss the pain points I identified in the scheduling flow. I originally organized my insights using a rainbow chart but was able to use Dovetail and their robust tagging system for future interviews. Both methods allowed me to quantify qualitative research and pull out key insights which would help the team determine which challenges to focus on.

Key Insights

• Admin staff were verifying the patient's insurance before scheduling their appointment.

• Admin staff were spending too much time contacting new patients to collect missing insurance information.

• Admin staff will ask insurance companies for the patients' medical and dental history as a way of vetting patients. e.g. if they have had a cleaning in the last 6 months, they don't need another one now.

• Patients who don’t share their insurance information when booking are more likely to cancel their appointments.

• The staffs lunch and vacation time are not accounted for in Opencare, which causes scheduling issues. 

• Dentists don’t want to fill all their available time with new patients.

• Dental practices want more control over the time slots Opencare patients see.
  

Challenge 1: Dental practices received new patient requests at times they did not want

When a patient requests a time that does not work the office admin goes back and forth with the patient to find another time that works and the likelihood of the appointment getting scheduled becomes 4X lower, resulting in wasted time for the dental practice.

This was happening because our integration was only looking at the office and dentist hours to find available time slots for Instant Book, but in reality dentists did not want to fill all of their available time slots with new patients. Practices want to ensure they have time to take care of their existing patients while bringing in new ones, but also that they are doing enough high value appointments to remain cash positive.

Challenge 2: Patient insurance information should be required

Dental practices did not feel confident accepting a new patient request from Opencare if the patient was missing their insurance information because it usually meant the patient was not insured and collecting payment for their procedure could be difficult. As well, patients who did not provide this insurance information were of lower intent and had a higher likelihood of cancelling their appointment.

Project Goals

• Improve Instant Book accuracy

• Increase appointment success rate

• Reduce the back and forth between patients and practices

• Reduce time taken to successfully schedule a patient in

The Design

To achieve our project goals and help customers overcome their challenges, I designed the Opencare Hours feature and evolved our checkout flow to collect patient insurance information.

Opencare Hours

Concept

To help dental practices meet their goals, we will allow them to control when they receive new Opencare patients by giving them the tools to self serve.

Once a practice sets their Opencare hours, another layer is added to the algorithm we use when looking for available time slots in the practices scheduling software. This ensures we are sending new patients to the practices when they want them.

Exploration

Through a series of prototypes and usability testing I was able to gain valuable insights and incorporate them into the design. I experimented with the functionality of the modal and the placement of update Opencare hours prompt to see if we’d get higher engagement by having it in a core workflow.

V1

V2

V3

Key Insights

• Dental practices need the ability to split up their availability on the same day.

• Opencare hours needed to handle availability for specific date ranges. 


• Adding additional intervals made sense and allowed practices the flexibility to account for non work time - e.g. lunches.

• There was concern that the user would always skip prompt to update their Opencare hours
.

• Taking the user out of a core flow to update their Opencare hours may be a jarring experience.


• Instructional copy needed to be clear and timely.

• Involving the engineering team early was key to ensuring proposed designs were in scope

Final Designs

Following usability tests of each version, I synthesized and iterated on my findings to create the final designs. In this final version, if the user selects “Indefinite”, patients will always see IB time slots in the patient app during the Opencare hours specified by the dental practice. If the user selects “Over a date range”, patients will see IB time slots in the patient app during the Opencare hours specified by the practice for that specific range only. If the duration of their previously set Opencare hours has expired or if 2 weeks have passed since they set their indefinite Opencare hours has been set, they will be prompted to update them. 

This level of customization gave our customers the control they needed when managing their dental practices schedule. 

Collect Patient Insurance Information

Concept

To guarantee we’re sending insured, high intent patients to our dental practices we need to collect the patient's insurance information during checkout. This is beneficial for both patients and dental practices because it empowers the dental practice to verify the patient's insurance and coverage prior to scheduling the appointment and the patient has peace of mind of knowing there won’t be any unexpected costs.

Exploration

Initial exploration included a “hold my spot” feature for patients because they often did not have their insurance information on hand and may not be sure of where to find it. Opencare would hold a patient's time slot for 24 hrs so they may retrieve the required information.

Patient Checkout Experience

Key Insights

• In most cases patients did not know where to find their member ID on their insurance card so we needed instructional copy.  


• There were different requirements for CA and US insurance.

• Patients would come back to add their insurance information if it meant their spot was secured but the “hold my spot” feature was out of scope for our MVP.



• Patients said they would find their insurance information if they were serious about the appointment.

• Patients found insurance card graphic helpful when locating their own member ID.

• Dental practices were excited to have the patients insurance information because it would save them time and allow them to focus on their patients.

Final Designs

To guarantee we’re sending insured, high intent patients to our dental practices we will collect the patient's insurance information during checkout, before they submit their new patient request.

This is beneficial for both patients and dental practices because it allows the dental practice to verify the patient's insurance and coverage prior to the appointment, so the dental practice feels empowered and the patient has peace of mind of knowing there won’t be any unexpected costs.

In this version we had descoped the hold my spot feature, but needed to offer the patients some instruction on where to find their insurance information if we were going to make it mandatory.

Patient Checkout Experience

Practice Appointment Scheduling Experience

Results

Since releasing these changes in the fall of 2020 we have seen,

• 10% improvement to appointment success rate 

• Decrease in new patient appointment requests

• Decrease in volume of customer support cases regarding Instant Book inaccuracy

Next Steps

• Revisit the hold my spot feature for patients.

• Continue to monitor scheduling data from our dental practices so we can learn and further improve the experience.

Tools: Figma, Invision, Respondent, Dovetail