Appointment Making Options and Callout Simplification (Johns Hopkins Medicine)

Planning

What

What appointment making options are available and to whom are they available?

Why

There are many different ways to schedule or request an appointment, and not all options are available to everyone. With many possibilities, many callouts have been created over time. In an effort to simplify decision making during site build, and to make it easier for patients to get appointments, we need to consolidate our callouts into one or two callouts that cover all scenarios.

Research goals

Determine:

• User types

• Appointment making options for each user type

• User flows for each user type and scenario combination

• Where paths overlap in order to consolidate callouts

Recommend:

• A data-driven (connected to databases) callout(s) to cover all needs

• A non-data-driven solution that can immediately be put in place

Anticipated outcomes

While this is a complex system with many user paths, it’s likely that many of the paths converge. It’s necessary to know all the paths, but creating a consolidation callout should be possible.

Approach

• Simultaneously research user types and appointment making options per user type by:

  • Reviewing current callouts, specialty appointment making pages, and MyChart for all options

  • Discuss options with service line content editors

• Document user flows for each user type and scenario combination

• Recommend consolidated callouts based on findings

  • One should be connected to databases to dynamically present links to exact locations within MyChart and phone numbers based on their needs, when these options are available

  • One should be recommended for immediate use that simplifies appointment making options but does not require database connections, links to main tools like MyChart and editable phone number fields are needed

Explanations and Outcomes

A significant part of my work is making complex scenarios simple, and understanding the best way to make an appointment with Johns Hopkins Medicine is anything but simple. It’s easy to be overloaded with the information in general, but while making decisions about your health, or that of a loved one, you can easily move from overloaded to overwhelmed.

On hopkinsmedicine.org, appointment making options are based on your specific scenario and it’s easy to be overloaded by information that isn’t relevant to you. While there have always been multiple ways to get an appointment—over the phone, online request forms, and through online medical applications like MyChart, to name a few—the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need to provide access to online tools first whenever possible. For many this can be a new experience and simplifying the process can be key to their success.

I began by creating user flows of appointment making options. (See Image 1: User Flows.) I ended up with seven unique flows for four different user types. Determining your user type and which appointment making path (flow) is for you needs to be easy, and no one needs to know or even see all the possible paths.

I converted my user flows to a simpler architectural layout by removing without all the technical details of the user flows. (See Image 2: Simplified User Paths.)

From a business perspective, patients can sometimes be grouped at a very high-level by their residency status—In or Near Maryland (being near Maryland means being close enough to travel to and from an appointment in one day), Outside Maryland (in a US state other than Maryland, that’s not near Maryland), and Outside the US. That can be broken down even further to consider them new or existing patients. Someone is considered an existing patient if they’ve previously seen a specialist and thier last visit falls within a particular timeframe. Both their residency/proximity to Maryland and patient status are used to determine the appointment making tools available to the user.

The next step was to examine the current way we were sharing this information with site users. Although there are multiple components available for this, I focused on the one most used throughout the site. (See Image 3: Request an Appointment Callout.)

While it covers much of the information needed, it doesn’t highlight the preferred user-path, which for many is online; it directs users to phone options, which can be inefficient when high call volumes increase wait times, while also creating a cascade of business consequences; and, generally presents much more information than is relevant to the user.

To not overload the user, or worse, overwhelm them, I created an experience that simplifies their options by taking them through a short series of callout screens (all taking place on the same page and area) where only relevant options are displayed. This solution requires the callout to interact with multiple databases to determine all the available options, like if a specialty allows online appointment making, and if so, which kinds and for who. (See Image 4: Appointment Making Screen Flow with Details.)

This simplified solution combines the details of all possible scenarios and includes the needed information for all the screens presented to the users. It also satisfies the business objectives of directing users to online resources whenever it’s most efficient for them, limiting call center overload and deferring work to technology when possible.

In some cases different online scheduling options exist for new and existing patients. Before being able to connect the callout to all the databases to know if a group allows online scheduling, a paired down version of this callout still provides all users with the information needed to schedule or request an appointment. (See Image 5: Schedule an Appointment Multi-Scenario Callout.)