Preventive Care Made Simple
Have you ever wondered what preventive screenings you should have based on your health risks?
What if instead of going to your primary doctor, you had an app for this info?
project summary
designing an AI-powered health prevention app that calculates people’s health risks, recommends medical screenings, and stores them with appointment reminders.
skills
UX research, design system, user journey, wireframing, prototyping
role
sole designer (independent project)
People care about preventitive health and want more ownership
Through an extensive survey and several user interviews, I found a gap in consumer health. People of various ethnic identities and backgrounds are now more vocal than ever about having more ownership over preventing disease and sustaining their health - using what technology is capable of.
1. People want to take more ownership over their health.
2. People have trouble remembering to schedule appointments.
3. People care about the educational component.
Participants rely mainly on their primary care doctor and friends/family for preventitive screening recommendations. However, friends/family are not medical professionals and there is often a long wait time to see PCPs. People want to be more proactive about their health on their own accord.
Despite preventitive health being a top priority for many participants, they struggle to schedule medical appointments because of their busy schedules, long wait times at clinics, and other external factors.
Upon receiving medical screening recommendations, people desire to understand why they are necessary and what they should expect when showing up to the medical appointments.
How might we enable people to prevent disease and
maintain good health over time?
It became imperative to design an app that provided not only a health risk assessment but also a way for people to easily remember scheduling for screenings over time. The app is intended to be incorporated conveniently into a person’s health journey.
The app was given the name Cita - which means speedy in Latin and appointment in Spanish. See below for the primary flows I designed for this health prevention app.
Completing a health risk assessment
The input to many of the app’s features is the user’s health risks. They are calculated after a user completes an assessment that gathers information about the user’s medical history, socioeconomic status, and family medical conditions.
Receiving results and setting reminders
Upon completing the assessment, the user receives results containing their health risks and preventive screening recommendations. The user may choose to learn more about each screening within the app or through the linked external resource. More importantly, the user can set automatic reminders that prompt them to schedule the relevant medical appointments at a pre-arranged cadence.
Viewing appointments in the catalog
In the appointment catalog, the user can view all the medical appointments that have been recommended by the assessment or manually added by the user. Each appointment has an associated status - ‘scheduled’ or ‘pending’ depending on whether the user has scheduled the appointment.
Clicking on the appointment card leads the user to a page with information about the screening and the provider. Customization comes in when the user adds notes, sets reminders,
or adds/removes appointments as needed.
Understanding health insights and the care team
Users can access their assessment results at any time by visiting the Insights page, which include information on their medical history, health risks, and preventive screening recommendations.
During user research, it was revealed that one of the reasons for appointment forgetfulness is that people aren’t able to accurately recall the providers they’ve been seeing. Therefore, the Care Team page was created to display the clinicians that the user has been seeing. Their contact info and last seen date are provided for additional context.
Leveraging AI to prevent disease and sustain good health
I designed Cita with the understanding that AI can be leveraged to quickly and accurately uncover insights that we’ve traditionally gathered from doctor visits only. More importantly, Cita follows the user’s health journey over time. As the user’s health changes, their risk charts and screening recommendations evolve too. Currently, this evolution depends on the user’s manual update of their health risk questionnaire. I hope to get Cita to a version where these updates are automatic and drawn from continuous health data - such as EHR data.
As humans, we often forget to prioritize our health and fall into the trap of being reactive to diagnoses rather than proactive. Cita is a promising tool that powers quietly in the background as we go about our busy lives. I am excited to eventually turn my designs into reality.