Helping people find the right care, not just an open appointment.
Designing patient self-scheduling that helps people identify, book, and manage the appropriate appointment—not just find the first open slot.
- My contribution
- Lead product/interaction design; developer coordination
- Context
- athenahealth patient self-scheduling
- Focus
- Scheduling clarity, appointment types, workflow consistency
- Methods
- Workflow analysis, stakeholder input, prototyping, design patterns
A booking is only helpful when it is the right booking.
Patients could struggle to identify the appointment type they needed. When preferred time slots were unavailable, some selected alternate appointment types just to be seen—creating friction for patients, clinicians, and front-desk teams.
The broader experience also involved insurance information, confirmations, rescheduling, practice availability, and workflows inside a complex healthcare organization.
Map the people and decisions behind an appointment.
I collaborated across disciplines and stakeholders to examine the existing scheduling experience, from the patient’s first attempt to book through practice-side details and confirmation.
The important design question was how to guide people toward appropriate care without making an already difficult process feel more complicated.
Identify
Help the patient find the appropriate visit type.
Select
Make available appointments easier to understand.
Confirm
Build confidence in the date, details, and next steps.
Manage
Support changes and clearer communication across teams.
A better experience for patients and practices.
Patient and practice feedback highlighted related concerns: visibility into appointment availability, ambiguity about visit types, insurance and confirmation anxiety, and the challenge of adjusting scheduled visits.
What we learned
Visit types were easy to misunderstand.
Patients could select a slot that did not fit the clinical need.
Design response
Guide the decision.
Make appointment categories and their purpose clearer.
What we learned
Availability could feel opaque.
Patients struggled to identify realistic options.
Design response
Communicate options.
Present suitable availability without encouraging incorrect workarounds.
What we learned
Confirmation needed to inspire confidence.
Patients wanted reassurance about insurance and appointment details.
Design response
Reinforce certainty.
Make relevant details and next steps more explicit.
Bring structure to both the interface and the process.
Alongside the scheduling work, I collaborated with developers, worked through component and pattern consistency, and brought Scrum Master practices into team coordination.
This is a part of leadership I value: connecting user needs, design intent, and implementation details so people can move forward with a shared understanding.
Designing for the full care journey.
The work explored clearer visit selection, appointment matching, and more understandable scheduling touchpoints while accounting for practice operations.
The work helped align patient needs, product decisions, and team collaboration around a clearer scheduling journey.
Healthcare UX matters because getting one small interaction right can make a stressful moment feel more manageable.