Role — Product Development & Research Strategy Collaborated closely with Engineering, Clinical Support, Marketing, Product Design & External Technology Partners
The Problem
In our quest to enhance patient experience and operational efficiency, we encountered a significant challenge —
🔍 Our home-built medical service and tele-health platform required engineering intervention for every update, whether it was for minor content edits or adding new features. This bottleneck not only slowed down innovation but also forced us to prioritize minimum viable products and temporary bandaids over optimal solutions due to resource constraints.
💡 Our objectives:
- Migrate to an e-commerce platform that gave our teams greater autonomy in managing the patient journey
- Introduce new features for our patients that had been in our backlog due to technical debt
The Process
1 — Collaboration and Understanding
The first step in our journey was to collaborate closely with our internal teams to identify the pain points and technical limitations of our existing platform. Through a series of workshops and interviews, we mapped out the existing challenges:
- Clinical Support: Our clinical team was hampered by their inability to efficiently manage and update medication information and patient services. This limited our capacity to adjust patient offerings and onboard new providers quickly.
- Marketing: Lacked the autonomy to update site copy or create new landing pages, severely limiting our ability to execute targeted marketing campaigns without engineering support.
- Product: Faced challenges in conducting A/B testing and accessing clear behavioral analytics, with the entire team relying on product management for website changes.
- Engineering: Burdened with constant requests for updates and modifications to our site, leading to increased technical debt and diversion from more impactful projects.
2 — Migration and Empowerment
Leveraging the insights gained, we began a comprehensive platform migration. This involved:
- Selecting an e-commerce platform that offered the flexibility and autonomy our teams needed (spoiler: we ended up creating our own)
- Migrating existing data and integrating new features that would enhance the patient experience.
- Training teams to utilize the new platform effectively, ensuring they could manage their respective areas without constant engineering involvement.
The Solution
We built our own platform that enabled us to manage existing features, add new ones, and manage products, and patients effectively. It was a year long project that required careful management of a roadmap that included adding in small feature tweaks to keep the company steadily profitable without sacrificing resources for the migration.
The Impact — The migration was a great success, leading to significant improvements across the board:
- 9% increase in average revenue, demonstrating enhanced monetization and patient engagement.
- 3.2% increase in conversion rate, indicating a more streamlined and effective patient journey.
- 2% increase in new active patients, with around 500k patients engaging with the platform daily.
- Introduction of new features, including an "add to cart" functionality for a smoother checkout process, a redesigned patient intake flow, and an improved symptoms quiz, all contributing to a more empowering and navigable patient experience.
Conclusion
The migration to a new e-commerce platform not only freed our engineering team to focus on high-impact projects but also significantly enhanced our internal team's capabilities, from clinical support to marketing. By enabling greater autonomy and efficiency, we set a new standard for our internal patient-centered tele-health services.