Healthcare Work

As a practicing Speech-Language Pathologist, I assessed, designed, developed and launched custom communication systems for patients with locked-in syndrome.

This effort required significant analysis and understanding of of the patient's residual motor capabilities, patient, family, and caregiver goals, and ability of the caregivers to effectively provide support when needed. Based on this information, these systems which included both communication and environmental control capabilities, were custom-configured.

For the first time since their neurological events, these patients could communicate with their nurses and begin to regain control over their environments. This effort also required the creation and delivery of training materials for caregivers and family members.

Challenge: A small medical device firm wanted to address the problem of in-field fatalities in battlefield conditions via the creation of a rapid infusion pump.

My activities: In partnership with an industrial designer, I created the user interface for an infusion pump designed for battlefield conditions. The industrial designer created the physical prototype. In total, the device was suited to conditions that would be experienced in the battlefield. Special features included the ability to infuse blood at up to 6x the normal rate of infusion, possessed an interface that could be easily read in low light, low contrast, high vibration environments, and was encased in a form factor impervious to dust, dirt, blood, while delivering fluids at the desired infusion rate.

Challenge: a major university hospital was struggling with Medicare reimbursement challenges due to readmissions.

My efforts: I created a fully functional prototype that automated the existing manual system to track core measures data. This data was used directly for Medicare reimbursement calculations..

When combined with the healthcare decision support system, frontline healthcare workers were able to proactively identify at-risk patients, thus reducing readmissions and protecting my client’s Medicare reimbursement.

Challenge: the VA wanted to expand their breast cancer tracking via new registry functionality in their VistA EHR system.

I applied the Requirements Visualization methodology that to gather requirements and evolve the design of the existing VistA EHR system.

This important design change, once implemented, created a new breast cancer registry that assisted physicians and other healthcare workers in identifying and tracking Veterans with abnormal mammography screening results.

Challenge: the VA wanted to be able to visualize changes to their VistA EHR prior to development. They wanted to use a prototyping methodology that allowed them to make changes to the prototype and leverage them for user testing prior to development. This approach led to the more rapid creation and launch of more intuitive interface experiences with faster onboarding and fewer errors once released.

I led the team that created the initial prototypes and requirements of key functionality within the VA’s VistA EHR system in preparation for forthcoming Requirements Visualization activities.

This effort served as a baseline to enable the VA to rapidly prototype and test future enhancements prior to implementation. This effort required significant collaboration with physicians and other healthcare workers to determine key functionality and assess accuracy of the prototype.

Challenge: the VA wished to improve access and consolidation of medical records, visits, appointments, care provider communications, and other health-related content for their Veterans and their caregivers.

I led the team tasked with creation of the future state prototype and associated requirements over multiple months in 5 different locations with Veterans and their caregivers as key stakeholders. This provided key design inputs to the VA’s MyHealtheVet website, and included the creation of the organization's first mobile-oriented prototypes as well.

The designs were ultimately launched. Some of the original concepts are still reflected in the system at https://www.va.gov/health-care/manage-health/

A major Atlanta-based healthcare system wanted to create a more cohesive patient and caregiver experience across their various websites for locations and specialty hospitals within their healthcare system.

I conducted interviews, developed prototypes and conducted usability testing to identify patient needs. I incorporated this user feedback to develop a singular experience for this system's future patent-facing website. My client incorporated these inputs as part of their rebranding effort and created a more streamlined patient experience.

Challenge: a highly acquisitive major life sciences organization, through acquisition, possessed 30+ different customer support portals for their various business units. This led to frustration and confusion for their users. The client desired to consolidate this content into a singular, more usable portal experience.

I served as User Experience SME for strategy, definition, design, and subsequent relaunch of 30+ different customer support portals into a single, unified experience. My efforts included in-person and remote user research, content strategy and analysis and development and delivery of user training materials.

The new portal was successfully launched and has continued to evolve, providing a better experience for my client's customers.

A healthcare payer services client was struggling to gain market share with their products. They requested an analysis of their current product team and processes, with recommendations to help them evolve toward best practices benchmarks.

I scoped the work and led the team which conducted organizational interviews, investigated processes and analyzed the client's outputs. We evaluated the strength of their product strategy based on the evidence obtained and related key findings and recommendations against commonly accepted product organization best practices. Our detailed outputs provided the detailed analysis and benchmark findings but also provided prioritized recommendations for remediation that the client was able to begin enacting immediately.

Challenge: Caregivers of neurodivergent children often face challenges with care coordination, support from the child's care team, and adjusting/adapting to events in the course of daily life.

Activities: a startup was working to develop an application that provided caregiver support using a a chatbot format to assist with issues related to care plans, child development, and ad-hoc daily challenges.

My contributions: I provided project oversight, hands-on stakeholder management, and executed product design reviews during the creation of this application for caregivers of neurodivergent children.

Challenge: The organization did not have an identified UX strategy for its aging but powerful suite of software solutions that served approximately 7 million users. The software had been developed organically over a number of decades, leading to inconsistent workflows that were difficult to learn and confusing to use, wrapped in outdated user interfaces. There was not a consistent research or accessibility program. A loss of focus on accessibility meant that the products had outdated VPAT's and varying levels of conformance to WCAG 2.2 standards. NPS had slipped and customers were frustrated. The organization was losing market share to newer competitors that had more modern user interfaces.

Task: I was hired to modernize the user experience process and product look and feel.

Activities: Although the organization had existing UX designers, there was not a program that operated strategically. The organization as a whole did not understand the scope or value of UX. I began by creating a simplified model of what User Experience encompassed and circulated that around the organization for awareness and buy-in. I made immediate connections with my closest colleagues in product and engineering, but also with customer-facing teams. I was able to leverage these relationships to get in front of customers firsthand to understand their frustrations and challenges.

I used this knowledge to develop key design improvements that could be incorporated into the existing product roadmap. Prototype testing revealed that users found these designs, primarily focused on improved information architecture, information design, workflow simplification, navigation and UI to be significant steps forward in both task efficiency and user enjoyment. These improvements were released to users; they were able to utilize the new functionality with little to no training.

At the same time, I partnered with product and customer-facing teams to de-escalate issues with customers frustrated by lack of accessibility progress with our products. This involved recurring conversations with these customers for visibility on accessibility remediation progress. For those products that were beyond the ideal timeframe since their last accessibility evaluation, I designed a program that prioritized certain products for accelerated accessibility evaluation based on the DOJ 2026/2027 requirements for WCAG 2.1 level AA conformance for public institutions. Efforts would be supported by contractors and internal resources.

I enabled my team to create a standing research repository where customer interviews, usability tests, and other feedback from internal partners such as support and customer success could be stored for consideration when designing new features. This repository enabled me to create a "signals from the field" report that was distributed to internal partners and used to inform/prioritize new product features or feature enhancements.

This document also allowed me to identify key areas of opportunity for the introduction of AI features that could provide true user value. I developed the organization's first AI chatbot design principles and explainability guardrails. I leveraged AI tools such as storyboarder.ai to create conceptual walkthroughs of future state experiences. I partnered with members of the engineering team to create a proof of concept that was both feasible and valuable.

Outcomes: The organization came away more educated and appreciative of the value of user experience. I had customer-facing colleagues proactively approaching me and my team to be involved in customer listening activities, thereby improving customer intimacy. New interactive and visual designs that streamlined workflows and simplified the effort required to complete key tasks were launched to positive response from our users. The merger with Transact Campus allowed me to accelerate the plans to evolve the accessibility program to the point where more products were being re-evaluated in 2025 than previously planned.

Challenge: the organization had frequent patient and caregiver complaints about patient usability of the meal ordering application. Patients rejected the application because of the challenges with onboarding, causing increased demand on nurses and other caregivers. Many clients had created materials to attempt to circumvent the patient challenges.

Activities: I led the small research and design team, conducting research with internal experts, recently hospitalized users, and caregivers of recently hospitalized patients. We created a prototype that reflected various user journeys to approach onboarding, and used this prototype to evaluate points of friction in the patient onboarding experience.

Outcomes: We identified consistent areas of challenge for patients and caregivers and developed alternative digital and service-oriented improvements that could be immediately implemented in client environments. Digital improvements were fed into the product roadmap for future inclusion. We estimated that the suggested digital improvements could reduce onboarding time for patients by up to 50%.