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Searching for a Better Way

A group of interdisciplinary teammates and I worked over the course of a month to create a conceptual product that utilizes AI in a meaningful way. Our team chose to create a platform for users seeking healthcare from a new provider. Current solutions demand much from the end user, only to provide them with a large amount of results that may not be relevant to their needs.

Team
Proof of Concept
Role
Branding
Product Design

If you’d like to learn more about the work done for this project, please shoot me a message.

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Problem

  1. At some point or another you’ve likely had to utilize your insurance provider’s online system to find a healthcare provider. Serving as a vital link between a patient and extensive healthcare directories, users rely on provider finders not only to streamline the selection process, but also to ensure that their chosen providers are within their insurance network, safeguarding them from unexpected expenses.
  2. It’s actually about the user, not the provider. Interactions with provider finders often occur during circumstances that induce elevated levels of stress. These situations include moving to a new area, changing employer insurance, receiving a recent diagnosis, or expanding one's family, among others. In such instances, users are faced with the challenging task of finding and confirming a provider who meets their specific needs, is covered by their insurance, and has current appointment availability. This combination of heightened stress, and additional responsibility placed on the user, creates an initial experience state that is far from ideal.

How might we reimagine the user's discovery process for healthcare providers while also delivering value with personalized results?

Solution

Utilize AI to help identify the right doctor, just just the right type of practitioner

Often, a patient may experience a standard symptom such as pain or weakness and then pushed off by the doctor, something that women and minority communities happen all too well. By asking the patient to describe their symptoms and pairing what we already know about the patient, we can better target specific doctors that may be a better fit for our particular patient. Our tool would:

  1. Analyze keywords from the patient's symptoms
  2. Compare against the patient's own medical history
  3. Compare with what we know about our healthcare providers and their other patients

Use information that we already know

We can utilize information provided by the user's employer to cut out repetitive steps that leaves the user asking "shouldn't they already know this?"

Personalize results for different user contexts

Sorting by distance is great, but a distance of half a mile or 5 miles can mean the same thing to someone who relies on public transportation or is traveling from the suburbs into the city to see a specialist.

Show thinking, show value

We made a decision to show the user the maximum number of results they could receive from the provider's network, but then to show the number going down as the results narrowed. This lets the user know the value of their insurance provider's network, while also showing that the platform is doing work in real-time to generate personalized results for the user.

Deliver personalized results

Finally, the platform shows the user their results, highlighting the doctor that is most recommended and why. Of course, users will want to see what other options are out there, so we provide a set of top matches to compare.

See the Prototype

See the Prototype

Takeaways

01.

There are ethical questions that we chose to not thread with this exploration. While the end product is an improvement as is, we did not flex the AI functionality as much as we could have, but doing so would require to ask ethical questions that were frankly, out of scope. Could we allow a user to give us a detail their symptoms and with machine learning, ask follow up questions that may either get to underlying issues or allow us to direct the user to a more specific practitioner that specializes in the problem we identified?

02.

The concept has plenty of real world application. What if instead of instead of healthcare insurance providers, this was a product for Autozone that empowered users to diagnose and repair their own car issues?

03.