Photo of person in front of food and tea holding a phone showing a food tracking screen.

Sutter Health

A digital program for anemia

Our team was tasked with helping an oncology practice at Sutter gain more time for new appointments and lesson their appointment waitlist. After speaking with the oncologists and understanding their workflows and user needs, we came to the conclusion that a digital program for benign hematology would clear up provider time for more complex cases, and better serve this population.

My Role

I led product design strategy working with two product managers on research, ideation, & sketching; I advised on the detailed designs. We were using basecamps “Shape Up” methodology so I shaped the work before handing over responsibility to the design and development team.

Exploratory Research

We interviewed both physicians and individuals/patients to understand workflows, provider and patient needs and pain points. This, combined with outside research, helped us gain an understanding of the patient journey, and where we might help.

Physician Findings

Physicians lack capacity to see patients for as long as they need
Capacity issues manifest in staff and patient pain points, including burnout
New patients are treated as a lower priority

Patient Findings

Patients lack adequate information about their condition or treatment
Patients do not feel supported by their providers
Most patients feel they will need to manage anemia indefinitely

Anemia Patient Journey

Ideation

With our research in hand, I led a short design sprint to go broad in how we could solve these issues, ending with a place to start developing.

HOW MIGHT WE?

… guide patients through their treatment plans?

… help patients get the most out of time with their care team?

Using prompts we took a day sketching broadly (crazy 8s), and voted on which directions to explore.

Figma jam screenshot with many posti-its, with circles showing chosen ideas.

Design Sprint Outcome: A digital program for benign hematology, starting with treatment plan support and nutrition experiments.

Design

We were using basecamp’s “Shape up” methodology, so at this point a product designer took the product pitch with rough sketches, and created detailed designs for the nutrition experiences. I advised on these designs only.

Phone showing nutrition experiment first page where user gets a choice of foods – tofu, steak, iron-fortified cereal, or nuts.

Phone showing user has chosen fish as their choice in nutrition experiment.

Phone showing planning a nutrition experiment.

Phone showing nutrition experiment experiment dashboard, with a counter for how many times you've eaten the food, and recipe ideas.

Phone showing food tracking screen design, with how much person liked it and how easy it was to incorporate