Flatiron Health is an Oncology healthcare technology company. While at Flatiron, I lead design on their first patient-facing product — the CareSpace patient portal.

We knew the mandatory regulatory requirements for the portal (👋🏾 HIPAA) and we recognized an opportunity to deliver tremendous value — viewing the portal as a step towards improving patient outcomes. But we were just starting out and had a lot of vision work and strategy ahead.

Any patient portal has two very distinct user-bases: the Clinical users (Physicians, Nurses, Receptionists, Patient Coordinators…) and the Patients.

I conducted research to understand each of the bases, their journeys and their intersections. We focused closely on how the parties communicated outside of physical clinic visits, situations like calling to request a prescription refill or with a care question, where a virtual portal could play a major role.

We uncovered insights into current communication patterns: it’s gaps. pain-points and opportunity areas that would guide the long-term vision of the product. In the immediate, we also used the findings to build out product roadmap for the next year and to deliver quick demonstrable value to partner clinics.