Referral Experience Redesign

🔑 Key Impacts

• Increased patient follow-through by improving referral visibility and guidance
• Improved care coordination through transparent lifecycle tracking
• Delivered a modular, scalable design solution with minimal engineering lift
• Created a reusable pattern for future clinical workflows

🎯 Objectives

• Redesign the referral experience to improve patient understanding and streamline next steps
• Boost patient follow-through and provide referral visibility to internal teams
• Map the full referral lifecycle and identify friction points for patients and staff
• Align design with product and engineering timelines to ensure feasibility
• Deliver a scalable, accessible component that can evolve with future needs

🔍 Problem

The existing referral process left both patients and internal teams in the dark:

• Patients weren’t sure what was supposed to happen after their appointment
• Many didn’t know if their referral had been sent, or how to follow up
• Internal teams lacked visibility, which made follow-up tracking difficult and inconsistent

This led to missed appointments, care gaps, and operational inefficiencies—ultimately weakening the continuity of care MDLIVE aimed to provide.

🧪 User Research & Insight Gathering

To ensure the redesign addressed real issues, I led a brief but targeted research sprint that included:

• Interviewed member support teams to gather insights on the most common referral-related patient complaints
• Analyzing help desk logs and qualitative feedback from satisfaction surveys
• Interviewing internal stakeholders to understand how referrals were tracked (or not) within their current tools

From this, we identified the three major user needs:

• Visibility: "Did my referral actually go through?"
• Guidance: "What do I do next?"
• Trust: "Who is helping me move forward?"

These insights directly informed our strategy and design priorities.

🎨 Design Solution

I designed a referral status card that clearly communicated:

• The current stage of a referral (e.g., “Referral Sent,” “Appointment Scheduled,” “Completed”)
• Next steps or actions the patient could take (e.g., view instructions, reschedule, contact support)
• A visual structure consistent with MDLIVE’s modular design system

Accessibility, mobile responsiveness, and visual hierarchy were prioritized to ensure that all patients—regardless of ability or device—could easily understand and use the feature.

🤝 Engineering Collaboration

To ensure efficient build and long-term scalability, I partnered closely with engineering throughout the design process.

Key handoff deliverables:

• Annotated mockups with responsive layouts and edge case handling
• Modular component structure that integrated with existing platforms
• Participation in implementation reviews and QA cycles to ensure alignment

This approach helped the team reduce rework and made the new design easy to adopt across other clinical workflows in the future.

🧭 Reflection

This project demonstrated how aligning user experience with operational visibility can drive both patient satisfaction and internal efficiency. By mapping the full lifecycle and designing for clarity and consistency, we delivered a solution that benefited everyone involved—without adding unnecessary complexity.

It also highlighted the value of design systems and close cross-functional collaboration in creating reusable components that scale across the product ecosystem.