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CVS HEALTH

As one of the leading and most experienced providers of specialty pharmacy services, CVS Specialty understands the complex nature of injectable, infused, and select oral medications. In their commitment to helping patients make the best decisions about their health care, CVS Specialty provides education and support that’s specific to each patient’s condition, even teaching patients how to take their medications correctly and safely.

Role: Senior UX designer
Responsibilities: user research, user flows, prototyping, usability-testing.

Tools
Sketch
InVision
Mural
Canvas
UserTesting.com
Jira

Intro 👋🏼

Our team, one of seven within the Adherence train on the Specialty side of the business, was tasked with creating a new product to help oncology patients adhere to their medications.  We were not replacing the relationship they had with their oncologist rather hand-holding the patient between doctors' visits to assure that the initial discomfort to the first oncology prescription they were experiencing, if any, was the forefront of their treatment journey.

Hypothesis 

30-40% of newly diagnosed oncology patients do not adhere to their medications. 

Solution  

Helps users navigate the ambiguity of their side symptoms through a symptom tracker.

Process 

Competitive Analysis

- Reviewed over 60 applications and web experiences that all called themselves "Symptom Trackers"

- Created heuristic analysis of the main competitors to understand complexity and offerings.

User Research
- Led four non-moderated user testing sessions.

- Created a panel of newly diagnosed oncology patients.Led two rounds of five people each of qualitative interviews.

Design

- Did three design thinking exercises with our Visual designer to take the best of both approaches.

- Designed within a 8pt grid system.

- The design had to be scalable to add any amount of side symptoms at any given time.

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Working alongside our UI designer, we would perform design thinking exercises and share with the team our approach.  We would then conduct a grooming session with our lead developer to ensure that our solution was feasible within the technology constraints. Once we received the green light from our developer, I would create wireframes for both mobile and desktop and subsequently conduct a grooming session with our entire team.  Once the designs were updated incorporating the team's feedback I would begin working with our content writer to craft the experience.  We were always at least a sprint ahead of development working with the content and UI designers allowing for bandwidth to troubleshoot issues.

Challenges along the way 😅

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- Manage user expectations and their pre-existing cognitive models on how a symptom tracker works.

- Working with a doctor-operated clinical board, meant no deviating from clinical scales.

-Digitizing scales whose initial use was intended for pen and paper for a cognitive impaired user.

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Diarrhea

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Fatigue

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Pain

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Insights from user research

Most participants stated they think reporting side effects and having the ability to connect with a specialist is very valuable and very useful.

"I think it's very useful because you don't know if what you're expereincing is normal, if it's excessive or if you need to look into it further. Doctors are busy and they may or not be able to get back to your right away."

90% of our users felt that an appropriate time to be reached by a Specialty Care Nurse should happen within an hour period.

"For me 30 minutes to an hour is reasonable"

Most participants found the Bristol Stool Chart to be useful in discussing bowel movements.

"I liked the fact that especially with the pictures to help you describe your stools, it was very helpful"

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Results 🙌🏼

CVS's Specialty Symptom Tracker helped save millions of dollars by ensuring the patients would adhere to their medications and refill their second dose.  90% of our users found the product helps to manage their stress and removed ambiguity in knowing if their bodies were responding correctly to their treatments.  We won an award after our first quarter as the highest achievers because we were the only team working in a truly agile way using a very new methodology for CVS, which was accustomed to working in the waterfall methodology.  The Chief Digital Officer overheard also praised our team and highlighted how important this was for our patients.  Our next steps were to build on the product's capability and listen to our users along the way - allowing users to engage with the symptom tracker on more than one occasion, adding text fields for the user to self-report, and providing them with different sources for l literature on their specific side symptoms.

Selected Works