Improving the Healthcard Number (HCN) Input Experience
June 2021 - August 2021
Think Research’s (TRC) VirtualCare (VC) application allows providers and patients to have virtual appointments in situations where in-person appointments/visits are not possible.
Currently, VirtualCare is live in Ontario and British Columbia. When a patient wants to register for an account so that they can be seen by their primary care provider, they have to provide their HCN. VC previously did not have any logic or validation in place during the patient registration process to account for the differing HCN formats across these two provinces.
Why is this a problem?
TRC is rapidly pursuing multiple system level opportunities to expand VC in other provinces.
The VC patient registration process in current state limits how it can be used by:
Patients from other provinces to access virtual care from their provider
Care providers from other provinces to send registration invites to new patients
Clinical teams to update a patient’s HCN in their profile if moved to another province
This would have prevented TRC from pursuing expansion opportunities across provinces outside of Ontario or BC.
My Role
As the Product Designer for VC, my role for this project focused on:
Collaborating with the Product, Engineering, Legal and Client facing teams to define a cohesive design & development approach to updating the HCN field.
Reviewing existing user feedback to ensure the business problem we are solving also serves to improve the end user registration experience.
Creating mechanisms in FullStory to track key usage metrics pre and post implementation.
What are our users’ goals?
In order to improve the patient and provider experience of inputting HCN in VirtualCare, I defined the following user goals based on the business problem at hand.
Assessing Current State User Flows
I took a look at how patients and providers currently enter healthcare numbers in VC to better understand where exactly they get entered in and what the impacts were of entering them in incorrectly.
How Might We…
Given that the previous state of VC did not have any logic in place preventing HCN entry errors or presenting province specific language depending on which province the patient was from, I decided to explore the following “How Might We’s”:
Introduce conditional logic to the HCN field to make the input experience context specific.
Genericize how “health card” and “health card number” are represented system wide to reduce development efforts given immediate turnaround requirements.
Secondary Research: Health Cards in other provinces
To better understand how other provinces format their HCN and refer to it, I reviewed the Government of Canada’s website and validated my findings with in house subject matter experts. This ensured that my proposed solution presents a province specific reference to the patient depending on which one they are from.
Commonalities found: Most provinces refer to a health card as such and the HCN as “Personal Health Number”.
Proposed Solution
Based on my findings from assessing current state and my secondary research, I proposed and validated the following solution with internal stakeholders.
Ideation
As the need for this improvement was driven by business needs, I focused on conducting two rounds of validation with our Engineering, Client facing, and Legal teams to ensure the key user goals would be met.
First round of validation conducted primarily with the Engineering and product teams to ensure technical feasibility given the tight timelines in place.
Second round of validation conducted with the Legal team to ensure compliance with nation wide provincial health guidelines.
Solution Implementation
After ideating through potential solutions, the following were the final designs I arrived at.
Evaluating Success
With the HCN input improvement having more recently gone live, I have built tracking mechanisms in FullStory to measure the following KPIs.
