Brand Integration

*To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted, edited, or changed all confidential information in this case study. All information herein is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of the client.

Patient Centered

Seattle Cancer Care Center was at the end of a 3+ year push to consolidate their care delivery across satellite partners and to debut a new identity. I came in with a focus on expanding the design language and clinic signage to reduce patient confusion when receiving care at separate locations. This work later expanded to include the website redesign, where our learnings from the clinic directly translated to better usability. Working with the partner organizations and patients simultaneously, I helped develop key insights that I later brought to my work with the marketing and app development teams.

Expanding the Brand -

• No matter how anticipated or overdue, changes to identity will be inherently opposed if bluntly instituted. Clear and considerate communication was needed to continue broad adoption, and we needed a renewed respect and empathy to help us curate the updated content. Patient experience was paramount in every stated goal, yet had little opportunity to contribute or help guide strategy or development.

Clinic Wayfinding - Outdated and uneven signage, patient experience, and partner presence needed to be fully rehabilitated, with all significant changes subject to legal review and Board approval.

Website Redesign - Information architecture and site navigation had not been updated for 5+ years. Two separate audiences (internal staff/external patient population) were both underserved by current site. Regulatory requirements for patients and study participants added complexity to data handling. 

Marketing Material/Collateral - Socializing the new brand would require a confident new voice, internal buy-in, a broad, multi-platform communication strategy, and brand standards diligently maintained as outreach efforts increased. Approved collateral had limited visibility and suffered ad-hoc misapplication. 

First-in-class Mobile App - As a relatively narrow focused healthcare organization, no precedent existed for accurately scoping an internal mobile app development team. This was compounded by the unique challenges of PHI and data security.

Tactics - 

We decided the first commitment would be to actively solicit feedback from both internal and external users:

• Research — paper reviews, competitive analysis, interviews, contextual inquiries, surveys, etc.

• Ideation  — brainstorming, diverging and converging on ideas, customer journey, personas, flows, etc.

• Discovery — new tools, user groups, stakeholders, regulatory concern, or other items with downstream dependencies, etc.

Clinic Wayfinding/Website Redesign/Mobile App - We held 15 patient focus groups across three months to really understand and synthesize the needs of our population. Modeled off of these sessions, I began a bi-weekly workshop for patient advocates, physicians, and clinic staff, where I - along with 2 savvy PMs and a brilliant Dev - moderated deep dive activities analyzing the design of clinic processes and impact on patient experience, scoping internal web portal needs, evaluating data management and access for externally facing web and mobile platforms, and early stage app development. My experience as a Protocol Manager for clinical research helped me coordinate and then classify the outputs from these sessions. I relied on the experience of the team for then getting the actionable information into the right hands.

No other process was as effective as these sessions in clearing roadblocks, sourcing and soliciting input, documenting our institutional knowledge, highlighting gaps in care delivery and patient experience, or at flagging downrange risk. The sessions I had initially started to just get context around our early feedback ultimately became the principal mechanism for actualizing high-level project goals through tactical problem solving. 

SOLUTION:

Tactics-

• Wireframes—ideas, sketches, brainstorming, what worked and what didn’t, testing results, iterations

• Designs— visual and graphic designs, tests/feedback, architecture, storyboards, etc.

• Support— guidance docs, common use templates, runbooks, best practices, vendor/manufacturer topsheets

Expanding the brand: Having such a ready source of feedback made the work relatively straightforward. I developed user personas and scenarios from the real world cases we had documented. Those were used to create a standard matrix for determining the 'correct' information architecture for clinic wayfinding. Classification was based on active provider, location, service hierarchy (demand/availability dependent), and site-specific considerations like specialty equipment and  construction. Mock-ups were produced, approved, and production ready templates generated for each site environmental team.

Guidance for best practices, vendor contacts, mapping, and formalized policy docs were all digitized and incorporated into a clinic wayfinding architecture runbook. 

Guiding Documentation

PRODUCTION PROPOSALS

WAITING ROOM ACTIVITY CARD

Concept App UI

Concept animation for 'first use' app load and login. Since sensitive HealthKit and PHI systems were queried during initial load, we explored different ways to manage user perception during initial launch.