Mayo Clinic

Problem

Even though Mayo attends to millions of patients every year, only a fraction of these was taking advantage of the assistance that Mayo’s patient travel services department offers, this also needed to be addressed.

My Role

As Senior UI Designer on the AKQA team that worked on this project, I worked with Adebimpe under the leadership of Alec, who was the Creative Director. Ryan, Laura and Blair helped with Client relations, Project management, and Strategy respectively.

I was responsible for formulating creative direction, ideation, design and prototyping, as well as preparing client presentation keynote decks.

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Goal

Improve over customer experience of the average Mayo Clinic patient by designing the following series of quick-win projects that would be easily-implemented.
      • Improve the rejection experience for the hundreds of thousands of cases (a year) that Mayo Clinic cannot admit
      • Design changes to the website to help Clinical Trials meet recruitment goals and reach diversity in participants.
      • Design changes to the website to increase number of patients who take advantage of the patient travel assistance provisions

Improving rejection experience

Mayo attends to only the rarest of conditions, and would prefer not to admit patients with cases that could easily be treated at a local hospital, hence they turn away hundreds of thousands of patients every year. Feeling they do not do this in the best way possible, work was needed to be done to improve the rejection process, and recommendation of alternative healthcare providers.
• How might we turn appointment candidates away without leaving them with feelings of disappointment?
• How might we point these people to trusted care providers closest to them who can take them in?

Factors that determine getting an appointment at MC
      • Potential patient has a diagnosis
      • Potential patient's diagnosis is a relatively rare condition
      • Potential patient has already sought primary care and condition persists or is beyond the ability of primary care providers

Solutions

Mayo's long appointment recruitment forms take a good amount of time to fill, this adds to the disappointment candidates feel when told they would not be taken because their condition is "not severe enough". Hence, we saved time for 80% of applicants by altering the first few question on the application form wizard to be tailored to determining eligibility.
In the case that the applicant is turned down, we present a list of accredited primary care providers closest by geolocation.

Increasing participants in Clinical Trials

Since each new study requires a unique pool of participants who meet highly specific criteria, recruitment for clinical trials is no small feat.
Two major clinical trial recruitment challenges Mayo Clinic is currently facing are...
• Around 80% of trials fail to meet their initial enrolment target and timeline.¹
• African Americans account for ~13% of the U.S. population, but typically make up 5% of clinical trial participants. The Latinx community accounts for ~19% of the population, but only 1% of those in clinical trials.²
These challenges are consistent with those faced by clinical trials in the larger medical community.

Solution

Through research, we identified causes and were able to design solutions which we tested on two ongoing clinical trial recruitments (on Knee Osteoarthritis & Lymphoma).
We tackled this by identifying issues with the current recruitment sources and designing new targeted outreach mediums to reach underserved populations and minority groups in the United States.

Promoting Travel Services

Mayo Clinic has only a handful of campuses in the US, and only on each in London and Dubai. This means that most patients have to make some degree of travel to receive care at Mayo. Many of these traveling patients have medical conditions that make regular travel provisions inadequate or simply impractical, think of a patient on movement or breathing aids such as wheelchair and oxygen masks. After arriving in a Mayo Clinic location, they also have special accommodation needs at a Motel or Hotel.

• Only a quarter of admitted patients reach out to Travel Services Department for enquiries at all
• Only a fraction of these enquirers end up utilising some of the many benefits provided for travel and accommodation