Project Overview
During the emergence of COVID-19, visiting healthcare facilities in person could expose healthy individuals to the virus. In response to this challenge, Prescryptive Health, a tech company founded in 2017, created an appointment platform facilitating the scheduling COVID-19 tests and vaccines for individuals through the US pharmacy community. It was publicly launched in December 2020 at New York.
Project duration
5 months
(Oct 2020 – Mar 2021)
Client
Prescryptive Health
Project Timeline
The solution
Design a platform that allowed patients and pharmacies to book and manage COVID-19 test and vaccine shots once they were available.
Considerations
- Use the existing Prescrytive infrastructure to reduce production times.
- The project must be ready to support vaccine shots following the US vaccination campaign.
- The engineering team needed some functionality definitions to achive the project in time.
The myRx platform
Mobile app
Allowed patients to book COVID-19 tests and vaccine shots. Patients could also buy other services as well.
The web platform
Allowed pharmacies to manage appointments, check patients’ information, record procedures, and send reports to state health departments.
Understanding the system
As the principal designer on the project, I worked closely with the product team to design the essential features. The product team already have ideas to address some of the features. So I used meetings to understand the elements in the system we wanted to get involved.
Internal conversations using sketches, mockups and prototypes help to create conversations about how things should work. These assets also help the team to have conversations with different stakeholders, like pharmacy owners to get feedback.
Conversations helped to discover other actors that were involved in the project. The Immunization Information system, PrepMod, VaccineFinder, Commercial insurances. This map needed modifications after the public launch. We didn’t considered States nor dependants in the first iteration.
Cynefin Framework was used as a guide to understand complexity of this project. From the Cynefin perspective, some features were simple to implement, while other ones like state-regulations were unpredictable, because some states could regulate the access to vaccines different than other states.
Framing the service
Prototyping the service
Platform public launch
In December 2020, Prescryptive partnered with the New York State government to provide COVID-19 testing at no cost for its residents using the platform. A month later, vaccine appointments were included.
After launching, the main focus was to refine the experience and improve its usability. Additionally, new partnerships with other states created new business rules.
Other design team members took over the work needed to continue the improvements. My role transitioned into a consultant, guiding the design team regarding the decisions made during the project’s creation.
Takeaways
This project was one of the most fascinating for me. Given my background, I was unfamiliar with the American healthcare system, which posed a significant initial barrier. However, it gave me insight into the system’s federal and state-level operations.
Furthermore, being the only designer at the start of the project presented another major challenge. I had to divide my time between defining certain features, designing them, and collaborating with the engineering team.
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