Sam Brown | Experience Designer

Social Work staff at Workit Health were burdened with a heavy workload.

This was primarily due to accelerated growth of the company and was leading to a decrease in overall morale and thus more difficulty in providing excellent patient care. The company's Design Director / Co-Founder and I set out to address this through staff-based user research.

So, I helped initiate a company-wide change to their workflow, easing overwork for the staff.

The research project resulted in the identification of various workflow improvements and potential feature developments in Workit Health’s in-house software product.

What started as a brief observational session to understand the experience of Social Workers led to the launch of a larger-scale research project dubbed the “Shadow Project."

Needfinding & Research

The question:

How might we better understand the experience the Social Work staff were having at work?

The problem was initially identified by the Social Work staff and brought to the Co-Founder / Design Director.

Let’s observe.

The initial investigation began with a contextual-inquiry-style observation of one of the Social Work staff for four workdays.

We had to understand:
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What a day-in-the-life of the Social Workers looked like
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What tools were they using
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How did they interact with their clients
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What were continuous tasks or responsibilities they had
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What tasks were unique to them
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How did they interact with the Workit in-house software
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Who did they interact with and how did they interact with them
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What kinds of tasks did they need to accomplish when interacting with others

One Social Worker was observed for four days.

The observation was informal and the participant was not interacted with except for a few clarifying questions in the first couple hours of each day. The observer could see everything the participant did from physical tasks and meetings to work on the computer and conversations with patients.

Observations continued with one other Social Worker, one Medical Assistant, and one Nurse Practitioner.

Personas were developed based on the observations to gain a bigger picture of each user group, their pain points, and core tools and responsibilities.

The personas and notes were then further analyzed to develop a comprehensive report of the primary responsibilities of each group, hacks they used to get their work done, workflows to be improved, and potential system improvements to help them.
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Major features in the results for Social Workers:

Adding automated features in the Workit in-house software to re-engage clients, indicate grant-eligible patients, and notify social workers of new results or follow-ups.
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Re-organizing the overview page of user accounts accelerate account review for inputting notes, documents, subscriptions, and payments.
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Add features for users to make their own appointments, payments, and drug test requests.
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Automate patient check-ins.

Major features in the results for Medical Assistants:

Improving the workflow between provider availability and scheduling to be a “one-stop shop.”
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Create a more streamlined, organized flow for hiring and training new MAs.

Improving the Drug Testing Room and automate the drug testing request process.

Major features in the results for Medical Assistants:

Integrating notes with Kareo to the Workit product.
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Reworking the overview page in Workit to information the staff need to know quickly.
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Overhauling the scheduling platform for providers.

On a side note - the Workit Product.

To give you some background, the “Workit Product” or “Workit App” is an in-house built software that houses Workit Health’s patient account data and their flagship addiction treatment online program. This product was used on the back-end by the staff to interact with clients (messaging), view their program status, store and view their account data, and more.
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This is a private application under NDA, so I am unable to show you the design of this software.

Presenting the Results

These results were delivered to the co-founder, who then used the results to develop further conclusions and feasible next steps.

Major additional results indicated:
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Most of the Social Worker’s time is taken up by messaging and email -- an opportunity to analyze messages and build in efficiencies.
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Specifically around prescriptions, payment issues, drug tests, scheduling, and requests for documentation

Those results were compiled into a final presentation to stakeholders delivered by myself and the co-founder.

Final results:

Raising patient autonomy in the Workit application:
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For scheduling and rescheduling appointments, making payments, and fulfilling drug test requests. Recommendation: overhaul the billing and payments flow, make changes to allow patients to request drug tests online, and overhaul the appointment scheduling process

Automating process to decrease task loads:

The onboarding process can cause issues because of a large amount of printing and scanning necessary, and the platform for provider schedules has bugs resulting in time consuming tasks. Recommendation: overhaul provider availability and scheduling, digitizing some of the onboarding process, and adding a ntoes template to the Workit documentation.

Moving responsibilities to other Workit teams:

Recruiting and training new social workers and other tasks like routing calls were bogging down the Social Workers. Recommendation: moving basic recruiting and training to operations with social workers in the loop (but not in a primary role) and routing pharmacy/calls to the nurse practitioners.

Reorganizing workflows:

keeping everyone up to date about patients, tests results, schedules, etc is time consuming along with technology issues and difficulty navigating Google Drive. Recommendation: rework the communication lines, reorganize Google Drive, and reorganize the client Overview page to give more information more quickly.
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See the Presentation

Next steps:

The identified action plan included management reorganization, changing individual coaches for clients to a more team-based approach, reorganizing the phone tree, and adjusting clinician availability to dedicated times. The co-founder took these results for implementation, as my internship concluded after this presentation.

...A Year Later

I reached out to the co-founder a year later, this last summer 2020, and asked about what happened with the project. The project made a big impact on restructuring workflows and easing staff strain.

The Shadow Project: Enhancing Staff Experience

The Shadow Project:
Enhancing Staff Experience