Check-In
Rushed. One decision per screen.
Case study 02Patient engagement
HealthGrid
Patient engagement before, during and after care, with no login. A text link, a check-in tablet and a family feed.
- RoleCreative Director, UX/UI Design Lead
- TimelineUntil the May 2018 acquisition
- PlatformTablet, phone and text link
- OutcomeAcquired by Allscripts, 2018
Phone
Tablet
This is the live product. Click anything to take over.
01The gap
A door nobody walked through.
The barrier was never the content. It was the front door.
1
tap. No password, no download.
96 hrs
the secure link stays valid
Client hospital CareNotify patient FAQ
Illustration. Portal figures as stated by Allscripts at the May 2018 announcement.
02The approach
Remove the step, not the content.
01
Delete the front door.
No login. No account. I held the line.
02
Use the channel they already have.
Push it to the phone in their hand.
03
One decision per screen.
A long form split into small screens. I argued for it.
04
Design for the least confident person.
The most stressed person in the waiting room.
03The journey
One visit. Four moments.
CareNotify
Anxious. The seven questions they would phone to ask.
CareNarrative
Hurried. A record cheaper than a conversation.
Discharge
Tired. A text, one tap, a plain-language summary.
A design model, not measured data. Allscripts later called this span pre-care, point-of-care and post-care.
04How I knew
Ask both sides of the same silence.
01
Two-sided interviews.
Families waited on hold. Nurses knew, with no time to fix it.
02
Seven questions, not seventy.
Seven live feeds, each a question families already phoned in.
03
Written against real HL7.
Against Cerner’s messaging. A feed that cannot be filled reliably is worse than none.
04
Client sites as the lab.
Abandoned check-ins, rejected claims and payments told us more than satisfaction scores.
Method as documented in my CareNotify and HandOff Notes specifications.
05App 01 · Check-In
Nineteen screens is a feature, not a flaw.
Registration was a clipboard. The goal was never a prettier form.
Try five of them on the tablet at the top
19
single-purpose screens in the flow
CareNotify Interface Specification
13
paper forms replaced per check-in
Miami Children’s, value sheet
6
legal captures, each time-stamped
CareNotify Interface Specification
~90%
of tablet check-ins paid by card
BayCare, value sheet
- Consent is the coreThe least exciting screens, the most valuable to compliance.
- Payment before the exitCollected while the patient is still there.
- End on a questionA one-tap survey. Every check-in becomes data.
Customer figures are from HealthGrid’s own value sheet: client-reported, not attributable to interface design alone.
06App 02 · CareNotify
Built for the family in the waiting room.
A chronological feed, not a dashboard. A worried person is checking whether the last hour was okay.
Who is looking after them right now?
- Native appFamily, during an admission. Live over HL7.
- SMS linkPatients, before and after. Nothing to install.
- In-visit videoA secure consult, plus education.
43%
of patients added family as messaging recipients
HealthGrid infographic
Zero accounts was a UX decision: trust at a glance, with a visible phone number for a human.
07App 03 · CareNarrative / HandoffNote
The handoff is where the story gets lost.
At shift change, what one caregiver knows has to reach the next. CareNarrative made it a record, not a conversation.
- Voice memo, first-classTyping mid-shift is a fantasy. A memo takes seconds.
- Tasks carry a name and a dateAn owner and a date, or it is a wish.
- A notes feed, not a documentSigned, dated, searchable.
Choose a patient, tick a to-do, play the memo. Synthetic data.
Built for Internet Explorer 8 tablets against Cerner HL7, per my October 2014 specification. Joint Commission on hand-off communication: Sentinel Event Alert 58, 2017.
08App 04 · Discharge
The forgettable minute decides everything.
Tired, sometimes medicated, asked to absorb it all in minutes. Discharge gave the conversation a second chance.
97%
chose discharge instructions on mobile
HealthGrid infographic
53%
of elderly patients engaging by mobile
HealthGrid infographic
- Close enough to be relevantOnce they are home and calmer.
- One card per topicSummary, education, records. One action each.
- As much detail as they want“More” opens the full list.
- A designed failureExpired links explain why and offer a new one, or a person.
Try it on the phone at the top
Free to the patient; standard rates apply; reply STOP to opt out. Timings: a client hospital’s CareNotify patient FAQ. Infographic figures are HealthGrid-reported, not attributable to interface design alone. WCAG applied to cognition, not just colour.
09Brand & system
One company, four products, everything it showed the world.
Booth, brochure and app had to look like one company. One person owned it all.
Booth-style panel in the brand yellow.
- IdentityLogo suite, plus the CareNarrative mark.
- CollateralCRM brochure, CareDocuments, value sheet.
- Trade showsHIMSS 2016 and HIMSS 2018.
- FilmThree product films and the CareNotify explainer.
BayCare, CareSpot and Tenet variants swapped the header and nothing else. Colours illustrative.
#0BB4ECHeader, action
#EEF9FDCard footers
#F5F5F5Section bars
#6A6A6AReading text
#FFC905Collateral, booth
#535842Wordmark on yellow
#73B843Infographics
#E6E6E6Empty controls
Colours sampled from shipped screens and my collateral, not a brand guide. Layouts redrawn as vector.
10Judgement
What I’d defend, and what I’d change.
Defend
Splitting the flow into small screens.
It kept a stressed person oriented and made six legal captures legible.
Defend
No account, ever.
Why it reached patients a portal never did.
Change
I shipped cyan with white labels.
White on cyan is 2.4 to 1; AA needs 4.5. I would deepen it for text.
Change
I designed per customer, not per system.
Near-duplicate screen sets. At care.ai I built tokens first.
Contrast computed from sampled hex values, WCAG 2.1 formula.
11Outcome
Acquired by Allscripts.
Allscripts already had a portal. It wanted patients who never used one, reached through contact details a practice already held.
- 3 May 2018Acquisition announced
- 21 May 2018Acquisition completed
- March 2019Veradigm investor materials: FollowMyHealth at 17 million patients in 2018; “40 million and growing” with HealthGrid.
- August 2022Veradigm: FollowMyHealth is cloud-based, mobile-first, for before, during and after the visit.
- January 2023Allscripts becomes Veradigm.
I have not verified how much of the HealthGrid line runs today, and do not claim it does.
Results, as published by HealthGrid
$1.2M
projected annual saving from electronic check-in
Miami Children’s, value sheet
36%
fewer rejected claims over two months, against the prior four months
Community Health Systems, value sheet
7.9 of 9.0
overall patient experience (limited data)
HIMSS booth panel, KLAS 2017
Client-reported, from collateral I designed. Not attributable to interface design alone.
What I took from it
- Remove the step, not the content
- Reach beats features
- One owner is a strength until it is a bottleneck
The best front door is no door.
Sources: Allscripts, Fierce Healthcare, Becker’s Hospital Review, MobiHealthNews, Veradigm, Kessels 2003, Joint Commission. Product screens are reconstructions I drew for this page, using synthetic patient data. Accessibility: WCAG 2.1 AA targeted, keyboard operable demos, motion off under reduced-motion.