Cerebral
Patient experience
My roles
UX writer, Content Designer, Content Manager, Copywriter
Collaborated with
Here are some of the ways I improved the patient portal and patient experience post-onboarding.
Product Designers, UX Researchers, Product Managers, Developers, Clinical, Legal, and Marketing teams
Duration
Oct 2021–Apr 2023 (1 year, 7 months)
Impact
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Boosted user self-assessment completion by 156% (9% → 23%)
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50% client inquiries resolved without customer support intervention
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Challenges
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Support experience was clunky, confusing, and clients had to wait up to 72 hours for a response.
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Patient portal self-help resources lacked any descriptors or encouragement to utilize, leading to low click rates
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Clients lacked a means to ask their care coordinator for a new therapist without the therapist themselves seeing the message
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Clients weren't completing their monthly care assessments, leading clinicians to not have a full picture of how they were feeling between visits
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Solutions and process
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Implemented conversational dialogues and clickable help categories, enabling a self-service resolution.
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Added subheader descriptions to self-help exercises in the hope of increasing click rates
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Wrote a screen and drop-down options for clients to request a new therapist without messaging their care coordinator
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Wrote new SMS notifications with more personalized copy to encourage clients to complete their monthly assessment
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Expediting the support experience
To decrease support traffic and get clients help more quickly, I worked with product managers and designers on the Retention pillar to create simple chatbot dialogue and clickable help categories (we affectionately nicknamed this thing "Cerebot").
Categories were designated based on the most common questions received by our support team. All copy for this initiative was housed and iterated upon as needed in Contentful.
This feature enabled users to resolve 50% of inquiries without customer support intervention.
Here's a video walkthrough of what it looks like on the client's end.
Self-care exercises
We noticed that clients weren't utilizing their self-care resources unless their clinicians messaged them a link, so we added some brief descriptions below each header to see if this would increase click rates.
Before
After
Therapist reassignment
Our support team came to us with a request to create a flow that allowed clients to put in a request to change their therapist on their own.
Up until this flow, clients had to make this request through our messaging system, which at the time could take a coordinator up to 72 hours to respond. Additionally, there was concern that clients could not privately message their coordinator to request a therapist change without the therapist seeing that message!
Per guidance from clinical support, we added other common reasons that clients could request to change their therapist, such as in the event that the therapist left the platform without notifying the client, or if the therapist no longer had calendar availability that worked for the client's schedule.
SMS and email reminders
We had an ongoing issue with clients not completing their monthly assessments. Our SMS nudging wasn't very compelling, so I tried a new approach.
Instead of claiming the message was from "Cerebral," (likely just a nebulous corporate entity to most clients) I further personalized the SMS by using the name of the client's assigned clinician(s). This was meant to be a gentle reminder that the client is receiving services from an actual human being—a human being who can provide them with even better care by seeing their progress between visits!
This approach increased assessment completion by an astounding 156% (9% -> 23%).
Before
"Hi Kate, It's Cerebral! Please take a moment to check in on your progress by completing a quick self-assessment!"
After
"Hi Kate, it's Cerebral! Your therapist, Janna, wants to know how you've been feeling lately. Please take a few minutes to complete your assessment."