Care Managers spend ~60% of their time making and documenting referral related activities.
Conducting 20+ user interviews each month helped to uncover an opportunity to address a common pain point that touches each of our main personas at Foothold Care Management.
The Process | Benefits
We identified the opportunity through our User Interviews. Each month we target one week to run 20 User Interviews with both Care Managers and their Supervisors. We also speak regularly with our Health Home admin team.
We explored an integration with Unite Us, a powerful referral platform in the state of NY. Some of the benefits of this solution:
● Streamlined workflow - Having Unite Us embedded within FCM will streamline the Care Manager workflow. Care Manager’s will be able to complete a larger portion of their daily work directly within FCM.
● Easier training - Staff are comfortable and trust FCM. With Unite Us integrated into FCM, Care Management supervisors feel like staff will have an easier time learning the new tool because of their comfort/trust with FCM.
● Adoption - CMA’s shared they’re having a hard time getting staff to use Unite Us referrals system. The reasoning they provided is that opening a new tab, logging in to another system is a workflow staff aren’t used to doing. Staff are extremely overworked and resistant to this sort of change when their old fashioned “pick up the phone” method has been working well.
● Visibility into referrals - The “pick up the phone” method leaves a huge data gap. The nature of those referrals tends to be somewhat of a black box. They are rarely documented in a structured and meaningful way. Using Unite Us will give visibility and clarity to the work being done. It will help streamline processes so that member care is followed through even on work that happens outside the agency.
● Save time by cutting back on the feedback loop - “Old fashioned” referral processes leave a lot of time on the table forcing Care Managers to track down referral statuses, find out if the patient/member showed up etc… This causes extra work and a lag in reporting. The integration will solve that by allowing users to interact and document against referrals right in the app, saving time and energy.
Usability Testing
Where to put this referral button? We identified potential solutions through our interviews and put it to the test by moderated conducting usability testing. Our goal was to see if the location of this new integration was intuitive and fit into their current workflow. This testing helped to identify 2 locations for this new referral button as they had had Task Success Rate (>90%) and had positive qualitative feedback.
Metrics / Monitoring
Below are the 5 ways we are tracking the success of this new feature:
1.)Breadth - we will capture adoption rate based on number of users using the feature/users who it is available to
Current: 32% Feature Adoption
2.) Frequency - We are tracking both DAU and MAU to compare how frequently people are using it as well as number of engagements per day by Persona
Current: DAU/MAU ratio of 20%
3.) Depth - % of weekly average users who use this feature
Current: 29% of users
5.) Sentiment - We solicit direct feedback from users after they’ve used the feature, with Pendo, based on a scale of 1-5
Current: 4 Sentiment Rating