Overview
About Doctolib
Doctolib is a French healthcare technology company providing digital solutions wich aims to improve the daily life of healthcare personnel and make access to healthcare fast and equal for all patients. Based in Paris, Doctolib offers various products for practitioners and allows patients to book an online appointment for free.
About the project
This project was completed as part of the Product Design Bootcamp at The Design Crew. This project was introduce for us by Raphaël Lorand, Product Design Manager at Doctolib, as a challenge they were actually facing. We had 2 weeks as a team of 3 product designers to complete this project.
Timeline
2 weeks
Role
Product Designer
Year
2022
Challenge
Problem statement
How to enrich and simplify the interactions between a patient and his practitioner via Doctolib ?
Goals
- Facilitate and optimize the preparation of appointments
- Facilitate and optimize post-appointment follow-up
- Increase the sharing of information and documents on the platform
Constraints
- The solution must be compatible and respectful of the Doctolib Design System
- The solution must be full-responsive
- The solution must respect and optimize the time and productivity of practitioners
- Anticipate the impacts of your solution on the B2B product
- The solution must meet a high accessibility standard (minimum AA)
Discovery
User research
In order to better understand the types of interactions that exist between a patient and his practitioner, as well as the possible points of friction, we conducted a user research session.
We recruited 5 people, of different ages and locations, all users of Doctolib but at different frequencies, including 1 person with a chronic pathology.
We have established 3 objectives to frame our research:
- Understand the context and experience of a patient during their health journey
- Understand what are the interactions and needs of a patient towards his practitioner
- Identify opportunities to enrich and simplify patient-practitioner interactions
Learnings / Key takeaways
This research session allowed us to draw the following lessons:
1. The exchange of post-appointment documents is painful for patients. The main point of friction is having to reschedule just to drop off results. In addition, the same results must sometimes be given to several practitioners.
I admit that it is off-putting to see your doctor and then go back to see him to give him results - Valentin
I leave all the time with the physical file that I have to send to everyone: doctor, dermatologist, oncologist - Gaëlle
2. The paper format is still used by some practitioners, who are not comfortable with digital.
The dermatologist, for example, has no health software, he takes my card and gives me a treatment sheet to send to Améli (Améli is the national health insurance fund in France). So I'm wasting time and it annoys me to do that - Jean-François
3. Conversely, patients are ready to switch to dematerialized format.
I'm used to it, I'm an old timer so it doesn't bother me. But if I had the prescription on my cell phone, I'd definitely use it - Gaëlle
4. Choosing a new practitioner on Doctolib is a complicated step, for the following reasons: doubts about the ranking, too many choices, not enough details on the profile, not trusting the information, no opinion from other patients.
This is the difficulty with Doctolib. There are plenty of profiles, plenty of options, but we don't know if we will appreciate the practitioner - Jean-François
5. Communication with practitioners who do not use Doctolib is not optimal, for the following reasons: irrelevant round trips with the secretariat, many communication channels, response time.
I exchange lots of emails with the secretary for nothing, whereas with Doctolib it's simple and obvious - Jean-François
Problem definition
We decided to focus on the difficulty of exchanging documents after meetings.
What people problem are we trying to solve ?
How to streamline post-appointment follow-up from the patient to the practitioner?
How do we know this is a real problem?
During our research, 100% of the people interviewed were confronted with this problem.
How will we know if we’ve solved this problem?
- Increase in the number of document sharing via Doctolib
- Decrease in the contact rate of the secretariat
- Increase in the number of appointments booked by a patient with the same practitioner
Exploration
What is actually possible on Doctolib
Currently, it is not possible to send a document to your practitioner after the appointment on Doctolib. This necessarily involves resuming an appointment.
After validating your appointment (video or face-to-face), you can share a document with your practitioner from your account. This functionality is possible before and during the consultation, but not after the appointment time - doctolib.fr
Assumptions
Not having data from Doctolib on this subject, we made the following assumptions:
- Technical constraints
- Business impact on appointment scheduling
- Spam risk
Solution & Prototyping
Following ideation exercises, we chose to develop a medical follow-up functionality, with the creation of a new “Medical follow-up” tab.
This feature should allow:
- To display the list of practitioners who are waiting for a document to be sent by the patient.
- Strengthen the presence of practitioners on the patient interface in order to enrich their relationship.
- To give access to another practitioner to the same medical follow-up to centralize information and allow faster exchange.
- To go further, this tab could also make it possible to contact the practitioner via instant messaging.
Access to the medical follow-up with a practitioner is also possible via the form of an appointment made in the “Appointments” tab. At the bottom of the form, a button “Access my medical follow-up” is available.
A document can be directly added to a medical follow-up from the “My documents” tab by adding the “Add to the medical follow-up” item from the dropdown. The patient can then select the available practitioner.
The “Medical follow-up” tab allows you to find the practitioners who have opened a medical follow-up with the patient. The interface is made up of different elements:
- A timeline with a reminder of all past interactions with the practitioner
- A button “Add a document”.
- A button “Add a practitioner”.
Trade offs
The practitioner can authorize or not the opening of a medical follow-up with a patient as well as its configuration. Thus, he will be able to avoid unwanted exchanges.
User Testing
We recruited 5 people, of different ages and locations, not all Doctolib users.
We established the following objectives for our test session:
- Verify that the medical follow-up functionality is understood and usable
- Check the fluidity of navigation to access the medical follow-up functionality
- Check understanding of the flow of adding a practitioner to the medical follow-up
We then gave them the following tasks to perform:
- How do you ensure that your general practitioner has access to the radio that you had at the beginning of January and which is available on your Doctolib account?
- Your doctor confirms that you need to see an orthopedist. In order to prepare for this meeting, he must also have access to this radio. What are you doing ?
Learnings
User tests helped us find out that:
1. The "Medical follow-up" tab is not used, for reasons of visibility or understanding
2/5 did not see the “Medical follow-up” tab
0/5 share or want to share the document from “Medical follow-up” tab
I don’t know what is “Medical follow-up” - Léopoldine
2. There is a confusion between “Medical follow-up” et “My documents” tabs
4/5 share or want to share the document from “My documents” tab.
I wonder what the purpose of the “My documents” tab is if there is a “Medical follow-up” tab - Léopoldine
3. The flow of adding a practitioner to the medical follow-up is not understood
4/5 think that the “Add a practitioner” button will add them to the left menu
I am surprised that the new practitioner does not appear on the left - Gaëlle
Solution improvements
Unfortunately, our test results found that the medical follow-up feature was not understood and not usable. As the project deadline approached, we had to quickly iterate on improving our solution. We relied on a verbatim of our tests which challenged us:
Finding my documents and my agenda is cool, but when I have to interact with my practitioners, another tab is better - Léopoldine
We therefore converged the results of our tests (confusion of the “Medical follow-up” tab) with the initial problem. The goal is to keep the medical follow-up functionality while making the user understand that he could interact with his practitioners.
We have therefore transformed the “Medical follow-up” tab into “Practitioners”, with the appearance of a notification when a document is necessary.
By default, once a practitioner has been consulted, it appears on this tab, with the possibility of deleting a practitioner when an exchange of documents is not in progress. The patient can also add a practitioner directly from his Doctolib file by clicking on the icon.
On the home page, a “Practitioners” space already existed. We turned it into “Last consulted practitioners” with a 6 card limit to limit duplicates.
When you click on a practitioner's card, a tab opens with different elements:
- A timeline with a reminder of all past interactions with the practitioner but also the possibility of sharing a document at the request of the practitioner
- A reminder of the practitioner's information.
- A “Make an appointment” button that links to the practitioner's Doctolib page.
- To go further, we could also imagine a button to contact the practitioner via instant messaging.
Also note that with the time limit of the exercise, we have abandoned the idea of adding an additional practitioner to the medical follow-up, which was not understood during our tests.
The objectives of these changes are:
- Improve understanding of the medical follow-up functionnality
- Avoid confusion between “Medical follow-up” and “My documents” tabs.
- Streamline navigation.
- Amplify the relationship with the practitioner at the heart of the interface.
- Offer a “more personal” space with your practitioner. Currently, a patient followed by a practitioner can only access the “commercial” file of the practitioner, accessible to all.
These solution improvements have not been tested in this project but are required to go further.
Impact
This project being part of my course at The Design Crew, we weren't able to measure its direct impact on users and the business.
If this had been possible though, as said in the intro of this case study, key KPIs to determine the success of the solution would have been :
- Increase in the number of document sharing via Doctolib
- Decrease in the contact rate of the secretariat
- Increase in the number of appointments booked by a patient with the same practitioner
