SOLACE HEALTH
Pairing individuals with dedicated care specialists to help navigate the complexities of the U.S. healthcare system.
OVERVIEW
Solace Health delivers expert care navigation by pairing patients and families with dedicated healthcare advocates. Solace Health helps patients through diagnoses, hospitalizations, chronic illness, and every challenge in between. The system becomes easy to navigate with the right advocate.
As part of a product design exercise, I redesigned the advocate profile experience and expanded the flow to include appointment scheduling. While the original prompt focused on advocate profiles, I identified a broader opportunity to support patient decision-making throughout the selection and booking journey.
Role
Product Designer
Scope
Desktop & Mobile Designs, Information Architecture, Product Strategy, Service Design
Project Type
Redesign
Timeline
3 weeks
Challenge
When a patient comes to Solace Health looking to pay out of pocket, they can explore advocate profiles to help narrow their advocate selection. These profiles showcase an advocate’s experience and play an integral role in a patient’s journey.
When a Medicare patient comes to Solace, we currently don’t offer patients the ability to see advocate profiles. Medicare patients were abandoning the experience at nearly twice the rate of non-Medicare patients (~20% versus ~40%).
Solution
Medicare patients were dropping off at a significantly higher rate than other patient groups, highlighting a lack of clarity and gap in trust in the experience. To help patients make informed and confident decisions with their health, I redesigned the advocate profile experience to surface advocate credentials, areas of expertise, and patient-facing information while introducing advocate selection prior to appointment booking.
ANALYZING THE EXISTING EXPERIENCE
1. Patients learn about the advocate, but have no understanding of what it would be like to partner with them.
While the existing profile surfaced important credibility highlights, it provided limited context around how an advocate could help a patient's unique healthcare challenges or what to expect from the relationship.
2. Information is difficult to scan.
Important information was across several expandable sections, making it difficult for patients to quickly evaluate an advocate and compare options.
3. Scheduling feels disconnected from decision-making.
Patients were asked to schedule an introductory call before receiving sufficient information about advocate fit, availability, or next steps, creating a potential gap between evaluation and action.
DISCOVERY: UNDERSTANDING THE TRUST GAP
Before exploring solutions, I wanted to better understand why patients were dropping off before scheduling care. Through an audit of the existing advocate profile experience and analysis of user behavior, I identified several opportunities to improve trust, transparency, and patient confidence. Many patients lacked sufficient information about who they would be partnering with, making it difficult to move forward with scheduling an appointment.
At the start of the project, we knew Curology’s original onboarding experience was no longer designed to support the complexities of a multi-user healthcare journey when it came to teen patients and their guardians. To better understand onboarding friction, I mapped the existing information architecture and created end-to-end flowcharts outlining how teens, guardians, and providers moved through consent, medical intake, and provider review.
After conducting both the audit and mapping out the journey, I then asked myself...
How might we help patients feel more confident when selecting and connecting with a healthcare advocate?
DESIGN PRINCIPLES FOR BETTER CARE NAVIGATION
Because healthcare decisions are highly personal, patients needed greater transparency into advocate qualifications, expertise, and care approach. The experience also needed to reduce friction throughout scheduling while giving patients more control over selecting the advocate who best aligned with their needs.
Build trust through transparency
Patients should understand who they are meeting with before committing to care. Advocate credentials, experience, and areas of expertise should be easy to discover and evaluate.
Reduce friction to care
Patients should be able to move from learning about an advocate to scheduling an appointment with minimal effort and unnecessary steps.
Support confident decision-making
Healthcare decisions can be overwhelming. The experience should provide enough information for patients to feel informed without creating additional complexity.
Empower patient choice
Patients should have control over selecting the advocate who best aligns with their healthcare needs, preferences, and goals.
DESIGN FEATURES
Advocate Profile: Reimagining the Advocate Experience
By surfacing credentials, specialties, experience, and personal background information, patients could make more informed decisions while building confidence before scheduling care.
Surfaced key trust signals upfront, including expertise, credentials, ratings, and insurance coverage to help patients evaluate advocates more confidently.
Expanded advocate biographies and credentials to provide greater transparency into each advocate's background, experience, and areas of expertise.
Introduced patient reviews to provide social proof and help prospective patients make more informed care decisions.
Consolidated professional achievements, experience, and recognitions into a dedicated space for patients seeking deeper validation before booking.
Appointment Scheduling: Connecting Patients to Care
To create a more seamless experience, I expanded the advocate profile flow to include appointment scheduling. Rather than treating profile exploration and scheduling as separate experiences, the redesigned flow allowed patients to move directly from learning about an advocate to booking time with them, reducing friction and supporting continuity throughout the care journey.
Integrated scheduling directly into the advocate experience, allowing patients to move seamlessly from selecting an advocate to booking care.
Increased transparency by clearly communicating appointment details, next steps, and what patients should expect before their visit.
IMPACT & REFLECTION
Because this was a product design exercise, the solution was not actually implemented. If launched, I would measure success through a combination of metrics below to better understand how the redesign impacted trust and care navigation.
Advocate Profile Engagement
Percentage of patients who viewed profile details, reviews, and experience information.
Appointment Scheduling Completion Rate
Percentage of patients who successfully booked an appointment.
Medicare Patient Drop-Off Rate
Reduction in abandonment throughout the advocate selection and scheduling journey.
Time to Schedule
Average time it takes patients to move from profile exploration to appointment booking.
One of the biggest takeaways from this project was learning how trust influences healthcare decision-making. Unlike many consumer products, patients are often making decisions during moments of uncertainty or vulnerability. Designing experiences that increase transparency and confidence can have a meaningful impact on whether patients choose to move forward with care.