MDLIVE / PRODUCT DESIGN / ASYNCHRONOUS CARE
Extending care beyond the visit
Giving 1M+ patients a way to follow up with their care team after the appointment ends, without picking up the phone.
HERO VISUAL / ADD IMAGE
Messaging UI across mobile + desktop
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
PLATFORMS
Responsive web, iOS, Android
TEAM
Product, Engineering, Clinical, Customer Support, Operations
TIMELINE
Launched in 2023
THE OUTCOME / CARE THAT CONTINUES
A new route to care. A foundation for what came next.
A cross-platform messaging service that lets patients request care between appointments—and gives care teams a clear path to resolve the request or turn it into a visit.
<#>
requests submitted in first <timeframe>
<#%>
resolved by message, no appointment needed
<#%>
converted into follow-up appointments
MEASUREMENT PENDING / Replace the figures above with verified launch data.
THE TL;DR
Care beyond the call
MDLIVE built a great virtual care experience, but it ended the second the video call did. Patients with simple follow-up questions had nowhere to go except the Customer Support phone line.
I led design for a messaging service that lets patients send structured, non-urgent requests to their care team, resolves what it can asynchronously, and converts what it can’t into appointments. It shipped across web, iOS, and Android, and became the foundation for other patient workflows that came after it.
01 / THE PROBLEM
Care stopped when the call did
Picture leaving a doctor’s office and realizing you forgot to ask something. You call the front desk, and someone helps you.
On MDLIVE, that option didn’t exist. Patients were left on their own after care. Customer Support fielded questions agents couldn’t clinically answer, and there was no way to keep patients engaged between visits or offer clients a new add-on.
There was a “messaging” feature, but it only delivered system alerts. It was a one-way mailbox, not a conversation.
ADD LEGACY INBOX / Messaging, as it existed: read-only.
“Patients expected what they get from every other app in their life: a way to just ask.”
WORKING PARAPHRASE / Replace with a verified research quote.
The goals
Patients: get answers between appointments without calling support. Operations: reduce avoidable calls and give providers the context they need up front. Business: drive follow-up appointments and create a sellable client add-on.
02 / UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
Start with the people hearing it every day
I started with our Customer Support team. We mapped the highest-volume reasons patients called, then sorted them into the ones that could be resolved by a provider or nurse in a message and the ones that needed an appointment.
I also ran a competitive review of patient portals and consumer messaging patterns, and usability-tested early concepts with <# participants>.
ADD RESEARCH VISUAL / Call-driver mapping, annotated with the categories that became messaging flows.
What we learned: <Add 1–2 sentences on the insight that changed the design.>
03 / THREE DESIGN DECISIONS · 01
Don’t hand patients a blank text box
A free-text field is flexible and familiar, but a message like “I need help with my meds” leaves providers guessing. The back-and-forth eats the time we were trying to save.
I partnered with Product and Clinical to define what each request type needs before a provider can respond. A refill request needs a medication; a lab question needs a test. Patients start with a guided intake, with free text for what the structure can’t capture. Hybrid beats either extreme: guidance for patients, actionable context for providers.
ADD ANNOTATED VISUAL / Blank text box versus guided intake
WHY IT MATTERED
Providers get complete requests on the first message, with fewer clarifying exchanges. <Add verified messages-per-request or response-time metric.>
DESIGN DECISION · 02
Messaging isn’t always the answer, so design the exit
The goal wasn’t to replace appointments. Some questions genuinely need a visit, and a patient stuck in a message thread when they need a provider is a worse experience than no messaging at all.
I designed messaging as a front door to the rest of care. Requests that can be handled asynchronously get resolved in-thread. Requests that need more get a clear, low-friction path to booking a follow-up appointment.
ADD ANNOTATED FLOW / Resolve in-thread or convert to an appointment
WHY IT MATTERED
Messaging became a source of appointment conversion, not just call deflection. <#%> of requests resolved by message and <#%> converted to appointments.
DESIGN DECISION · 03
Plan for the worst case, even when it’s unlikely
This is a service for non-urgent questions. But healthcare means someone, someday, will use it during something that isn’t non-urgent.
Working with Clinical, I built safety guidance into multiple points of the triage flow, directing patients to 911 or 988 as appropriate. The guidance sets expectations early and reinforces the service’s boundaries. <Confirm the exact placement and triggering rules.>
ADD ANNOTATED VISUAL / Safety disclaimer and redirect moments
WHY IT MATTERED
It protects patients, sets honest expectations about what messaging can do, and gave our Clinical team confidence to ship.
04 / SHIPPING IT
One service. Every platform.
Over <# months>, I designed the full experience across responsive web and the native iOS and Android apps, with one consistent set of patterns underneath.
I built the UI to be extensible from day one: new request types plug into the same intake, messaging, and appointment-conversion patterns without a redesign.
ADD SCREENS / Web, iOS and Android, annotated with key interaction decisions
VIDEO / ADD RECORDING
From first question to next step.
End-to-end messaging flow. Replace this placeholder with a de-identified walkthrough.
05 / IMPACT
Measure the care outcome.
METRICS TO VERIFY / Add a measurement window and source to each result.
<#>
requests submitted since launch
<#%>
resolved via message without an appointment
<#%>
converted to follow-up appointments
OPTIONAL EVIDENCE / <Change in support call volume> · <Clients adopting the add-on / revenue influence> · <CSAT figure or verified patient quote>
WHAT CAME NEXT
Bonus round: it kept paying off.
Soon after launch, the roadmap added a self-service tool for patients to request their medical records and send them to other providers. Rather than build a separate entry point, the team used the messaging triage flow to route patients straight to it. That was a feature we hadn’t planned for, handled by a system we’d designed to scale. Mission accomplished (for now).
06 / WHAT I’D DO DIFFERENTLY
A closer look back.
<Add 2–3 candid sentences about the hardest trade-off, what you learned after launch, and what you would change next. Ground the reflection in a specific decision or observed result.>
Made with care. And a little mischief.