Jenny Ho




Making property data approachable at Archipelago


Improving access to social services at Healthify


Personal projects

Healthify

Meaningfully track client progress
Research, product design, UX writing



The challenge: Healthify’s referral feature was too vague for social workers to add meaningful updates. How could we better document client progress?

The solution: We started with a low-risk MVP to test if clear instructions and small UI optimizations would encourage users to update referrals more often. 

Months later, we updated our referral feature to encourage teams across payer, healthcare, and community organizations to coordinate on client care.

My role: For the MVP, most of my time went into stakeholder interviews, user testing, and secondary research. For the MVP, I did UX writing and light UI design.

Later, I went through an end-to-end process (research, gathering requirements, design iterations, regular feedback sessions, QA) to get the feature shipped. I supervised a product design intern for a few weeks.

Impact: Healthify brought on its first network partnership to the platform soon after referrals and admin tools were built. The Network Management team could now recruit CBOs across the US. 

Since we now have aggregate patient data, so we can now tie user engagement to community health outcomes.


Here’s the crash course in social work & referrals.

There are two primary groups who work together. Referral senders are case managers at an insurance plan or provider. They create referrals for their clients and may follow up periodically. 

Referral receivers are CBOs (community-based organizations) that directly provide services to clients sent their way. They must report client interactions like contact attempts, enrollment status, and type/quantity of services provided.

One important aspect is that referrals (“I called the client and set up an appointment”) are different from services provided (“The client came to the appointment and got the services they need”). 


What happens when a client is referred?

Healthify’s existing referral functionality consists of 1) creating a referral and 2) updating the status with 5 general options. It’s not useful because it conflates the referrals with provided services. Plus, each organization has their own policies for client interactions, so these statuses are too open to interpretation.

I conducted a 2-week research sprint to find out if there’s language, tasks, anything that’s industry standard. 

What do social workers do? I referenced previous user research and conducted a few interviews to understand how case managers work with clients. Then I organized notes into a user journey map. 

What happens when a case manager meets with a client?


How should actions be grouped? I ran a card sorting activity with users to see which actions are similar. If we were to split them into 5 groups, what would those groups be?

The most common groups.
How actions were categorized.
The most common pairings.
How closely actions were related.


What can be fixed now?

My research uncovered several product limitations, so I worked with product managers to decide what’s in the MVP. The main technical limitation was that we must keep 5 statuses. Adding or removing a status has a high implementation cost, because it’d affect Healthify’s data models and customer reporting.

Included in the MVP: Referral statuses can be renamed to match real life workflows. We can also add static text like definitions and examples in the UI. I ran a writing session with Product, Marketing, and Client Services to decide on new names and definitions.

Saved for later: A referral isn’t always a one-time event. There could be multiple appointments or ongoing services with long timespans. A client could also be on a waitlist, so progress can’t be made, but it should be documented somehow.

Scoped out: Sometimes a client is sent to another service, so marking a referral as complete or canceled doesn’t make sense. When a client returns, or additional services are provided, there should be a new referral to log this information.


Giving users clear instructions was key.

The MVP consisted of a simple form where users can update the referral status or add a note. When users change the status, they’ll see a dropdown with examples. For notes, we added helper text on who their audience was and what information to include. For simplicity, we did not require users to add notes for status updates.

There are clear instructions for updating statuses and adding notes.
Users now get more guidance when updating the status.

But there are deeper problems to fix.

Since the MVP exposed product shortcomings that needed more investigation, the Product and Client Services teams did a month-long research project where we interviewed CBOs. Overall, financial constraints were the #1 concern.

As a solution, Healthify would connect CBOs with payers and providers. Insurance companies and hospitals would send clients to preferred CBOs. They’d get reimbursed for providing social services. 

CBOs need to track services they’ve provided for accountability, so we needed to redesign the referral feature for more in-depth progress.


Which details matter and when?

There’s plenty of details within a referral, so I did a card sorting activity to determine how information should be grouped in the UI.

What matters to each group? I compared user and stakeholder interests. For the in-app experience, I prioritized referral receivers, because they’d use the feature most frequently. In contrast, reports would better serve stakeholders.

What’s the purpose? Is it contextual? Which details are users expected to supply? Is it dynamic or static?

Who prioritizes what?

Which information belongs to which section?

Take 1: A referral inbox to encourage collaboration

Inspired by email and messenger apps, I designed an inbox that treats referrals as a collaborative effort. Users could quickly find a specific referral and add updates for everyone else to see.

The layout facilities communication among the care team.
Users log client encounters with this form.
However, when I pitched the idea to internal stakeholders, the idea fell apart. Too much information was shown at once, and it was hard to determine what the most important content was. Plus, client needs should be more prominent, since it's a high priority detail for any user who’d visit that page.

Exploring varying layouts and scope.
Getting close to the final layout.

Take 2: A client-centric UX to track progress

The feature eventually became an ongoing progress report where users can monitor client needs. Users are encouraged to add updates and catch up on the client’s most recent milestones

Logging progress and reviewing client needs are the most important actions.
Log client encounters with this form.

Hide or show additional details.
All activity appears in the timeline.
After finalizing the direction with stakeholders, I fleshed out the rest of the feature. This included a PDF version for EHR integrations and customer reports listing services provided.