Overview
I led vision, design, and research for Solv’s expansion from urgent care into primary care. We shipped new detail pages, an electronic health record (EHR) integration, and leveraged some existing urgent care product flows for the foundational product, driving over $500k in revenue and 9,500+ bookings for 200+ providers.

Context
Solv is an urgent care marketplace that lets patients browse clinics and book visits, while helping providers and operators boost patient volume and experience. Similar to an OpenTable for acute health needs.

Opportunity
In late 2020, the COVID vaccine was on the horizon and the growth potential of urgent cares was uncertain. How we might we leverage our existing urgent care software to expand into a much larger primary care market? This could align with leadership’s vision of a universal marketplace for all everyday healthcare needs, expand our total addressable market from 10k urgent cares to 140k primary care offices, and improve retention post-pandemic.

Goal
Grow monthly recurring revenue from primary care practices; second, increase clients’ online booking volume by 20%.

Role
I worked closely with a product manager, engineering manager, and a small team of engineers over a year while leading the research, vision, UI/UX design, and testing for the foundational product. This included patient-facing pages, small updates to our provider-facing product, and a new electronic health record integration.

Research
I interviewed leadership, providers, and staff at primary care practices to better understand their day-to-day workflow and priorities. To learn more about patient needs, I ran a card sort and conducted interviews with people who had recently found a new doctor. I compiled insights and shared within our team and at our company’s all hands for visibility.

• Primary care practices want to reach and maintain full schedule of patient appointments while managing efficiency. Offices rely heavily on an electronic health record (EHR) to manage complex appointment types (which can have varying lengths, availability, or even locations), patient data, and insurance information — a piece of software that is legally required in the US.

• Patients care most about finding a primary care provider who is in-network, competent, caring, and convenient. Patients relied heavily on word of mouth and online reviews to vet provider quality ahead of an initial appointment.

Product vision
I led a cross-functional workshop to generate ideas and imagine what an excellent experience would be like for primary care patients, managers, and office staff personas. I organized common themes to create a shared product vision and presented these slides at during our product review to inspire excitement, alignment, and energy.

Our team envisioned a product in which:

• Patients could search for any healthcare concern and quickly find and book a great doctor for their needs

• All booking and paperwork details would be seamlessly transferred into the electronic health record, saving the office staff hundreds of hours of tedious labor

• Over time, providers could offer better care to more patients, and leadership executives could better understand and optimize their practices’ performance.

Stage 1: Efficient booking and scheduling integration
The biggest challenge was figuring out how to surface and navigate provider schedules clearly to patients while strictly managing scope.

Surfacing available appointment times was valuable to patients, but we had to consider how to surface the right schedule to the right patients.

• A primary care office often had multiple providers with different schedules.

• A provider might have different availability, locations, modalities (video v. in-person visits), and types of appointments available depending on the patient needs.

• We were working under a tight deadline to ship v1 for our first client with only 2 full-time engineers, so we needed to keep scheduling UI as flexible as possible to work across different pages and devices

We had to choose between 2 options:

After gathering feedback from product reviews, user testing, and our primary care partner, we chose direction B since we could reasonably assume most users booking through these pages would be new patients seeking a new patient visit.

Stage 2: Attracting new patients with ratings & reviews
Our initial launch received positive feedback from our partner and prospects, but we needed to increase patient traffic through SEO improvements and reviews. Research showed that most patients seeking a new provider would vet online ratings and reviews before the first appointment. And having high-quality user-generated content on these pages could improve SEO over time.

I audited dozens of online reviews and noted common themes to understand what attributes patients were seeking from a new provider.

I refined, tested, and updated the ratings categories with general feedback from user testing, legal and medical feedback from our internal stakeholders during multiple product reviews, and scope-related feedback from our engineering team.

Stage 3: Enhancing paperwork for primary care needs
Sales feedback showed the existing paperwork features, which had been pulled from our urgent care product, weren’t comprehensive enough for primary care providers.

We gathered and refined a solid set of questions that could cover most provider needs while offering a good patient experience.

• Our product team conducted an audit of the most essential paperwork questions for primary care providers.

• I took this list and ran multiple workshops with our chief medical officer to confirm how providers would use the information and the best ways to collect it.

While we couldn’t shorten the flow by eliminating questions, we could give users a better experience by simplifying each step. I had a hypothesis that we could improve patients’ sense of progress and completion rates by increasing the number of steps, but simplifying each one by giving each question its own page. This change would require more engineering time, so we conducted user testing to validate the hypothesis.

Patients found the one-question-per-page framework clear and intuitive. Furthermore, the comprehensiveness of the paperwork flow was seen as a benefit, not a burden, to their healthcare experience.

Leveling up the org
Along the way, I implemented a new design system, a design documentation library, a research and testing guide, and an onboarding guide to improve the speed, quality, and impact of the EPD org.

Outcome
The product received $500,000+ in annual recurring revenue, 9,500+ appointment bookings for 200+ providers, and positive qualitative feedback from partners early on. But unfortunately, it was sunsetted after a year due to lack of product-market fit.

💰$500,000
Annual recurring revenue

Reflection
Our approach had over-prioritized supply (driving value for primary care practices and measuring success through revenue) and not enough on demand (driving patient value and measuring success through booking volume) while building a marketplace.

We began to apply these learnings into a more specific vertical (dermatology services), but ultimately leadership shelved the initiative because we weren’t ready to invest the time and resources that a new marketplace would require.