Value-based mental healthcare MVP

Quartet, 2020 / Product Designer

Background: Quartet partnered with Blue Cross NC to test out the first concept iteration of a value-based care model for mental health. I was responsible for designing the contractual obligations into product.

Goal: Allow MHPs to add their full patient panel to Quartet and take the necessary VBC actions for all VBC patients.

Process:

• Problem Definition: Internal discovery with stakeholders to determine the predefined requirements and metrics being tracked for the program

• Solution Exploration: Usability testing

• Solution Definition: Final designs

Link to prototype:  Main designs

Background & Goal

Background:

Quartet partnered with Blue Cross NC to test out the first concept iteration of a value-based care (VBC) model for mental health. I was responsible for designing the contractual obligations into the product.

Our business team partnered with Blue Cross NC to determine what they wanted to track initially to base bonus payout on. The idea was that BCNC would give bonuses to providers who completed certain actions to demonstrate were providing quality care to their BCNC patients.

Goal:

Quartet has historically been a platform that deals in referrals. So we take patient information and match them with a provider, and send that match (referral) to the provider. This means the only a portion of the provider’s patient panel was available on Quartet.

Our first goal was to allow providers to upload their full Blue Cross NC panel to the Quartet platform so that they could participate fully in the model.

The second goal was to help the providers participate in the program by guiding them through the VBC requirements in product.

Problem Definition

Internal Discovery

I held meetings with internal stakeholders to determine what the idea, goal and definition of success were around this entirely new concept for our product.

I also read through the requirements portion of the contracts to better understand what we were required to build and report on our end.

I looked at metrics on how many practices and providers would be participating in the program. I also got a sense of what the patient population would be. These conversations lead to a lot of questions and two critical constraints.

Due to the initial discovery nature of the project and contracted timeline, leadership made a decision to not dedicate time or resources to initial user research.

Requirements:

• Add additional BCNC patients to Quartet

• Input a treatment plan for qualifying patients within 90 days

• Input a progress update 60 days after the treatment plan

• Submit results for 1 baseline & a follow up assessment within the calendar year

An agreement was made early on that for this V1 MVP, we would allow users to upload additional patients through a single form upload and after the launch we would add on the ability to bulk upload through a CSV.

Solution Discovery

Crazy 8’s

I held a Crazy 8’s ideation workshop with all the designers, researchers and the three product managers who’s work this overlapped with.

Since this concept was so new to the product and not well researched or defined,  this was useful in getting all assumptions and ideas on the table so that we could all operate on the same foundation. I used the ideas that came out of the Crazy 8’s session to inform a variety of designs that I created to show and test with users.

Usability Testing

I was able to successfully advocate for time to do usability testing with providers in order to get some user feedback before launching a very new concept into the product.

I created three different prototypes and had users complete the same 3 tasks for each prototype. This gave me some insight into how to best support the providers through design in understanding the program requirements and how to complete them.

The research questions I had were:

• At what point in the patient journey would they upload a BCNC patient? (ie a bunch of patients at once or when they schedule an appointment?)

• Is the user able to easily upload a new patient?

• Is it clear what the actions needed to take for additional reimbursement are?

• What kind of background information is needed in the product to inform users about this new program?

Solution Discovery

Usability Testing the client upload form

Impressions:

These two screens were two ways of testing out clarity in the upload restrictions. We were limiting the ability to upload patients to only Blue Cross NC patients and wanted to make it clear to users to prevent errors and user frustrations.

Generally, users stopped and read the modal whereas no one I tested this with read the banner at the top of the upload form. For the final designs, I utilized the modal concept.

Learnings:

Small practice MHPs are going to be more motivated to participate in the program as they are usually doing their own administrative work.

The point of upload for small practice MHP’s would be after their first appointment and maybe once every other week. Larger practices that have administrative staff would upload these patients into Quartet when the patient calls to schedule their appointment.

Testing next steps comprehension 

Impressions:

This is one of two screens I showed users to test clarity around communicating the next steps in the program with the design. The scenario here was “You just uploaded a new BCNC patient, how do you find out else you need to do for the patient?” and “Where would you go for more information about the program?”.

Users tended to miss or overlook the placement of the program card on the first screen, but upon discovery, had positive impressions of the checklist idea. This idea of checking off the “to-do‘s” of the program really resonated with them.

All users preferred the placement of the second card being higher up in the IA, and actually wanted it to be placed even higher. They wanted it to stand out amongst the business that can become a patient timeline.

Solution Definition

Takeaways from the usability test informed the final designs in the following ways

1. I opted to keep the modal & update the add client button to inform users only BCNC clients can be added

2. Reorganized some fields from the insurance area of the upload form because there was a common point of confusion around there.

3. Created a checklist card with all steps of the program and moved it to the top of each VBC patient timeline.

Beyond the concepts tested in the usability test, I used pre-existing knowledge of MHP workflows in the product to further integrate this program into the product.

Most MHP’s are informed of what we want them to do through tasks we surface in the Task Dashboard page. So we decided it was important to include these VBC signals in the Task Dashboard since that is the primary place users operate out of.

This meant creating a new task type for assessments and creating a visual signal so the user could identify and prioritize the VBC patient tasks.

Final Designs

Annotations