The digital front door app at Novant Health is designed to minimize the time users spend in it. This counter-intuitive approach was the result of careful planning and thoughtful design by their internal product management team and close collaboration with patients. Here is how they did it.
Swaay.Health had the opportunity to sit down with Julie Marino, Manager of Product Management at Novant Health to learn more about their app, their approach to product design, and how they collaborate with their marketing team.
Product Management at a Healthcare Provider
What was immediately intriguing about Marino was her role at Novant. The product management function is common at health IT vendors, but rare to see at provider organizations.
When Marino was hired, she was a lone wolf – the sole person in the organization focused on making all of Novant’s mobile applications better. “I’ve slowly grown so that I have several teams now,” recounted Marino. “Our focus is on product development in its purest sense. I have a team of developers and we manage anything mobile that ever comes across the table.”
“When we started, we were like a little startup within Novant Health,” continued Marino. “Think of all the great things about a product startup. We were innovators. A small team. Agile. In fact, we built our first mobile app in just 90 days.”
Digital Front Door App
The app that Marino and her team were working on was called MyNovant and it was meant to be the digital front door for everything at Novant Health. In particular, the app was to be a bridge between Epic’s MyChart patient portal and the branded Novant Health experience that the organization wanted.
“Our day to day is focused on the sustainability of the app, performance of the app, making sure that we’re aligned with our security measures and things like that,” said Marino. “But we are also a true product team and that we do design and user testing.”
That focus on design and user testing is what led the team to minimize the time users spent in MyNovant.
Patient Input for Product Design
From Day 1, Marino put patients at the center of the design process. She did not start with a technical wireframe or assembled a minimal viable product in a vacuum. She sought out patient input to guide her design decisions.
“What we heard most from our patients is: ‘I don’t have time to do all this administrative work’,” shared Marino. “’I don’t have time to figure out when my appointment is or how to get there’. So we streamlined everything and kept it to a very simple workflow. We don’t want patients to spend a lot of time in the app. We want them to come back over and over again and feel confident that they get what they need to get done. My rule is less than three clicks.”
Marino was able to tap into Novant’s robust patient advisory network which has over 3000 members that contribute on a regular basis. They not only collaborated with patients on the design, but also involved them in the user testing phase – a critical step in the product lifecycle where workflow and other usability issues can be addressed quickly.
“We don’t develop anything that we don’t test first because we feel it eliminates like 90 percent of the risk of what we build,” said Marino.
Close collaboration between Product and Marketing
Given the marketing focus of this publication, we had to ask Marino about the collaboration (if any) between her team and the marketing department at Novant. It turns out, they worked closely together.
“MyNovant, in fact, was a marketing and sponsored initiative,” said Marino. “Our VP of Marketing, our Chief Marketing Officer and our Chief Information Officer, worked together on this initiative when we started it three years ago. That relationship has deepened and grown over the years that we’ve been working together.”
At Novant, there is a dedicated digital experience team within the marketing department that is the primary point of contact for Marino and the product management team. Together these two teams cover the clinical, technical and marketing needs of mobile/digital projects.
The result are apps that fit the needs of end users and fulfill Novant Health’s brand promise.
“I have committed to the notion that expressing a great patient experience is at the heart of everything Novant does,” concluded Marino. “Whether it’s your digital experience or your point of care experience that is the North star for our CEO. To support that, the digital experience needs to be aligned from a brand perspective. We need to show that Novant knows me. Novant knows what I need. Novant knows what I want.”
Watch the interview with Julie Marino to learn:
- What Novant looks for in a vendor partner
- How the Novant QA team is deployed internally
- Why having control over their technology stack improves the quality of Novant’s patient experience
Learn more about Novant Health at https://www.novanthealth.org/
Tagsdigital experience digital front door ElevatePX Julia Marino marketing collaboration MyChart Novant Health patient co-design
