❤️ Advancing Heart Health @UnitedHealth

How might we... Increase patient engagement in the Heart Failure program to decrease unnecessary hospitalizations and reduce healthcare expense.

Heart Failure is a serious condition where your heart stops being able to function properly as a pump. Whether you have suffered a heart attack or have a weakening/ hardening heart, Heart Failure describes a heart that no longer performs at 100%. This condition is more prevalent in the Medicare age population, and drives considerable healthcare costs due to hospital re/admissions caused by retained water weight in the body. This can be easily prevented by monitoring your weight to watch for sudden increases through a simple household scale.

The challenge our Heart Failure remote patient monitoring service faced was how to get eligible members to voluntarily enroll in the program and regularly step on their scale. To improve healthcare costs for the consumer and the system, we had the opportunity to re-design an engaging Heart Failure remote patient monitoring service from end-to-end that met the needs of consumers as well as business, operations, and the insurance plan.

View related UXR best practices learned from this project and more. See 12 Frameworks to Assist in Data Analysis for how to effectively analyze insights from user data, and 4 Elements of an Effective User Story for how to efficiently document user stories from insights.

Ethnography service blueprints call listening workshop facilitation digital prototype testing remote patient monitoring experience mapping ops focus groups

UX research process:

First, to understand the business opportunity, we planned and executed cross-disciplinary workshops, including product, CX, marketing, clinical, and technology stakeholders. This provided direction, boundaries, and objectives to carry forward throughout the design / research stages.

Created service blueprint to map user experience, operational touchpoints, partnerships and other key service touch points.

Second, we embarked on insight gathering mission across the consumer, operations, and technology to better understand limitations, expectations, and opportunities. We conducted 16 ethnographic consumer interviews to learn what Heart Failure meant to consumers, how they expected to be communicated with, and other factors that directly or indirectly influenced their decision-making.

Conducted ethnographic interviews to understand human perspective and recommendations to improve user experience.

We also facilitated clinical operations focus groups and working sessions to learn about different types of consumers from their perspective, as well as what works well and doesn’t. From a technology and experience standpoint, we created a service blueprint that laid out all touch points, processes, and flows to be used throughout our initiative.

Led nurse focus group sessions to identify user perceptions and barriers to engaging with heart service.

Observed clinical and non-clinical calls to identify best practices for new scripts and messaging.

Third, we synthesized our insights, themes, and design principles in order to make informed decisions about consumer touchpoint design, messaging, user experience, etc. We carefully examined and redesigned each touchpoint, adding new interactions where necessary, and removing non-value-add interactions. Overall, we redesigned the outreach marketing, scripting, supporting education materials, remote patient tablet/app user experience, and created a new website landing page.

Ran cross-disciplinary workshops to identify new ideas for service improvement from POV of engineering, product, clinical, etc.

By improving the business metrics, clinical tools, and consumer engagement, we successfully met the opportunity of improving the health and costs of our members. It's very rewarding to know that we directly impacted the health the the tens of thousands of consumers who engage in the Medicare Heart Failure service annually, and we continue to do so as this redesigned experience lives on.

Additional process images:

Created experience design principles from user insights to foster scalable design patterns across all major health condition services.

Re-designed remote patient monitoring app and experience to improve overall user engagement with the app, tablet, scale, etc.

Launched digital website experiences for Heart Health service to improve caregiver access.

Testimonials:

"Thank you for brining me in. You are a FANTASTIC partner" – Sr. Marketing Manager @Optum

"A huge THANK YOU for facilitating the nurse focus group discussions. Not only did you perform well in your active role, but your thorough note taking and quick turn around time assisted the NPS Action Group to make informed decisions. All of the nurses responded that they would love to assist in the future. This is a direct indication of your relationship skills, and I appreciate them." – Clinical Operations Manager @Optum

"Thank you for all your hard work on the many disease management service improvements we have implemented and are working on. You help us create a better member experience, improve our NPS, and improve overall engagement. I appreciate your ideas and ability to execute on projects." – Sr. Product Manager @Optum