Virtual Waiting Rooms

Waiting Rooms in the Age of COVID

Sitting around in a doctor's office is not anyone's idea of a good time. In the age of COVID-19, this inconvenience became a safety hazard, as patients packed into offices waiting to receive care. Our team took on the challenge of decompressing waiting rooms, with the aim of not just increasing safety, but developing a platform for a more streamlined and pleasant patient experience.

I led our team's research efforts, and co-managed the scoping, development, launch, and iteration of the resulting tool. By remaining in close contact with the full breadth of stakeholders, we prioritized concrete needs and kept to a tight timeline.

Uncovering the Roots

Our work focused on serving outpatient radiology as a proof of concept. Once this partnership was established, I had to uncover what exactly caused build-up of patients in the waiting room.

I found the following critical pieces of information:

1. Patient's had an inconsistent understanding of necesary preparation, and a limited ability to refer to their own medical history and information provided to them.
2. Patient arrival timing was unpredictable, with some patients arriving long before their appointment, and a number arriving late.
3. Forms required digitizing, and often requested duplicative or previously provided information.

Digitizing and Integrating

Given our findings, we faced the challenge of providing persitent and clear information to patients, normalizing patient arrival times, and limiting repeated and analog form completion.

To achieve these ends, we worked closely with teams across the enterprise, as well as with our EMR vendor. Our team built a back-end to manage patients along their journies, and user-facing flows to prompt patients, coordinate just-in-time arrivals, and collect necessary form data digitally. All patient forms and statuses were presented to providers in a dashboard designed by our team, bridging front and back-of-house operations. Patients completed forms using existing Qualtrics licenses, leveraging paid-for software and lowering the bar to compliance.

Scalable Impact

Within a month of launch, our platform achieved over a 96% Net Promoter Score from patients, and over three times the adoption rate of existing digital offerings. Staff unanimously preferred our system, in no small part because of extensive co-design. Multiple departments approached our team about expanding, representing a clear path toward more user-friendly and pleasant patient care.