My Health Online

Enhancing patient experience through simplified navigation and usability of high impact features within MHO

How it started  
I began this project as part of Sutter Health’s company-wide Innovation Challenge.

I began this project by submitting concepts to Sutter Health's company-wide Innovation Challenge. Though not a formal design initiative, I approached it using design thinking principles. A few months later, Sutter's Consumer Strategy and Digital Access team reached out, they had reviewed my submission and wanted to explore the ideas further. What started as a conversation evolved into a collaborative partnership to redesign the MHO app experience. I was invited to develop prototypes, conduct research, and provide strategic recommendations to improve the product

Problem Space  

Patients using the MHO app struggle to find key features like scheduling appointments due to buried navigation. This confusion leads to missed actions, user frustration, and added burden on hospital staff who must follow up manually.

Goal

Increase patient engagement and reduce operational inefficiencies by improving navigation and usability of high impact features within MHO, particularly scheduling appointments.

My Role

I led the design to improve MHO app's navigation experience. This included identifying usability gaps, analyzing competitive patterns, gathering stakeholder and user input, and designing prototypes that reimagined key task flows like scheduling appointments, all within existing platform constraints.

Discovering gaps in My Health Online app

I gathered feedback from managers and patients and after that I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the current MHO app.
To broaden my understanding, I also explored how Sutter’s competitors approached similar challenges, studying their navigation patterns, language, and visual hierarchy.
Carbon Health
TelaDoc
One Medical
Kaiser
All platforms have a tab bar, and each of these platforms features a clear layout, engaging visuals, and some degree of personalization, allowing users to quickly locate what they need.

Key Insight

The main challenge with MHO was unclear labels and buried navigation. Unlike competitor apps where core actions were prominent and easy to find, MHO patients couldn't easily recognize or access essential features, making important tasks like scheduling appointments frustrating to complete.

Defining priorities

With multiple usability issues across the app, I needed to identify which problem would deliver the greatest impact for both patients and the organization. Through user research/analytics/stakeholder interviews, I discovered that appointment scheduling was both the most frequently used feature and the biggest source of user frustration, making it the clear priority.

Initial concepts