I built the practice of design and research that was transformational in revitalizing the beloved clinical tool.
At the beginning of 2018, athenahealth was facing a problem. 3 years prior they had acquired a successful but aging medical reference content tool. For all intents and purposes it had been set on a shelf in maintenance mode. Executives had not fully understood how to integrate this powerful tool into their existing offerings like EHRs (Electronic health records), but knew it had immense value for clinicians that still used it. The platform was still generating revenue through paid subscriptions and pharmaceutical ads, but had slipped from $50MM YoY in revenue to just a paltry $23MM.
I was hired to build a design and research team from scratch and revitalize the platform.
Major changes included a new brand, design system, and new features
By improving key experience paths for new, existing, and lapsed used resulted in a 146% conversion to paid
Epocrates was ripe with low-hanging fruit. I had identified key paths for Revamping table-stakes flows (like sign up and onboarding, or making it easy for users to understand the value of a paid subscription). This proved to have a substantial and immediate impact when my team started making updates. So much so that we saw a 146% increase in conversion to paid accounts. We also addressed a leaky bucket problem. New user attrition was relatively high. We were losing hundreds of users every month for a variety of reasons like content gatekeeping, excessive paywalls, and non-intuitive navigation just to name a few. I partnered with product leadership to devise a experience and content approach to address the core user problems creating attrition. The result was a net positive growth of +3% month over month.
After early success, or what I always referred to as “digging us out of our hole”, it was time for a durable 12 and 24 month experience strategy. I had witnessed the outsized role UX improvements and research insights could have on the company’s success through best-in-class design, so my plan to expand the design organization received the green light.
A corner stone of building design fluency within the organization was to scale up a usable design system. This is not always a recipe for success given how prevalent existing kits like Material UI are, but it was right for epocrates. At the time, we had two full native platform teams, writing in Swift and Java respectively, in addition to a full team devoted to our web experience. See, epocrates was one of those rare platforms that start its life as a mobile phone app back in the palm pilot days, so I knew building components that would inform web would a force-multiplier when the time for creation came.
Our biggest challenge in addition to reviving core experiences was navigating a patchwork of UI and design that reflected the brands legacy at every phase (and the countless teams that added to the app in the past). To combat the further expansion of a disparate experience, we conducted a full audit of every corner of the app. We then started with new atomic design elements and worked our way up. Within a quarter we had all of the basic components available for every developer to work from, in addition to a robust Figma library. This investment greatly sped up our development life cycle, including cutting down on communication churn between the U.S. and Bangalore-based development teams responsible for feature work.
When it came time to tackle the desktop version of epocrates, we had the full Method Design System enabled, componentized on all platforms and shovel-ready for the developers. We reduced the average story-point estimation by 30% across the board.
If Act I of my tenure at epocrates was building the design org and racking up quick wins, then Act II would be focused net-new feature development fueled by a full research team. I built the research team to deliver large-scale, repeatable, and statistically reliable insights that would better understand and validate our users primary problems better than we had done at any point in epocrates history. I worked to instill a data-driven ethos and a turnkey user recruiting process. This kept a healthy stream of of new and existing users providing insight. We introduced new methods of discovery and validation like multivariate testing and quick concept evaluation.
During discovery and bringing the product team through a Jobs To Be Done exercise, we identified critical gaps in existing medical reference content in the market. For example, the original UI prevented new epocrates users from exploring the rich features in the app. We solved that by introducing a personalized experience that used machine learning to link new content and features based on a wealth of clinical data and the behaviors of our large user base. Every clinician needs to accrue CME (continuing medical education) credits over the year, so we designed and implemented a brilliant CME offering that allowed users to quickly accrue that time while using our app. Essentially saving time and providing a necessary service for busy practitioners.
We identified that antibiotic resistance was a major concern for most practitioners. With aide from a key partnership with LabCorp, we used aggregated data to build a real-time antibiotic resistance map to help clinicians make decisions on treatment courses. The users would simply enter in the ZIP code and how wide to cast the search. We would quickly return up-to-date information the types of isolates present in fluid samples, and provide immediate recommendations on the course of treatment or what medication would be most effective. This feature was in our premium offering and provided a tremendous value for existing epocrates+ members and an attractive feature for conversion to paid.
From July 2018 to the spring of 2022 I was responsible for user experience strategy, product rebrand, and UX research for epocrates. By first focusing on foundational team growth and identifying key user paths for immediate growth, I was instrumental in the changes that led to a 146% increase in conversion to our paid tier. Additionally, by identifying and addressing the root causes of user attrition, epocrates experienced a net positive growth of users +3% month over month.
Through 4 years of UX improvements, a rebrand that pushed an aging product into the spotlight, and a slew of best-in-class feature releases I helped the business realize revenue growth of $50MM. At the end of 2021, epocrates had fleshed out athenahealth’s product suite and aide in a successful acquisition.
