Supporting a Healthier Life for All
Context
Location and Duration: Remote, USA for 4 years
Loyal began in 2015 as an organization focused on improving patient and provider experiences. The organization originally began with three point solutions, but quickly realized that to affect change at a larger scale, we would need to power multiple parts of the patient and provider journey and make a more holistic system. To do this we decided to build a platform of products to complement EHRs that are so integral to the health system enterprise and fill in the consumer gaps that health systems face. In doing so we transform the patient experience and make health system operations more efficient.
Loyal's vision
Improving health by making care more clear, accessible, efficient, and consistent for patients and the providers they rely on.
The problem
Patients struggle to access quality, affordable health care. America’s complex health care system has created a disjointed experience that falls short of patient expectations.
Hospital systems rely on a patchwork quilt of disparate point solution vendors to support not only their patient experience but the internal, working of their enterprise. Most of these vendors' products weren't originally built for a healthcare context making it even more difficult to configure for their needs. They also have to deal with a mess of legal regulations, privacy, security, the government, and insurance.
a disjointed patient experience
challenges with new patient acquisition
low patient engagement
care gaps and lack of care coordination
lack of visibility into patient communications and their care journey
operational overhead and cost associated with multiple vendors
lack of actionable insights to inform decisions about growth and appointment utilization
Discovery and research
For each product space we conducted Discovery's with our enterprise clients. Each product team utilized and customized a guide, that I created. This guide enabled our teams to hold workshops, conduct interviews and user tests with stakeholders across each health system, ranging from executives to operators. This research enabled us to not only understand their specific ecosystems, pain points, and needs, but also acted as scaffold to inform our own strategy. Through our learnings, we discovered value which determined our focus and priorities.
As we iterate on our products designers and researchers continue to conduct targeted research initiatives including generative, evaluative, usability testing and more. These initiatives shape our products and maintain our consumer focus. In addition our designers rely on the quantitative data gathered by each team's data analyst.
Our strategy
In order to transform the patient experience and make health system operations more efficient, we need to guide patients from the beginning of their care journey and empower providers with tools that help them operate their clinics and hospitals more efficiently and make better informed decisions.
Our product and go-to-market strategy centers around three main product pillars that remove barriers to care, reduce friction in the experience, create efficiencies for the health system workforce, and ultimately create healthier and loyal patients:
“Attract”, “Access” and “Engage”.
Attract: acquire new patients and retain current patients
Access: increase access to care with consumer digital channels
Engage: streamline outreach to improve patient engagement
Our platform solution
Our platform is a set of cohesive products that utilizes machine learning, natural language processing, industry leading data integration and workflow tools.
Attract
Health Risk Assessments
Lead management
Ratings & Reviews
Directory Listings
Access
Care search
Scheduling
Chatbot
Engage
Campaigns
Appointment reminders
Loyal OS
Provider and Data management
Consumer Data Platform
Digital Front Door: Care Search
It can be a daunting task for patients to find the right kind of care and a provider that best matches their specific needs. Our research has shown that patients struggle with using the right terms, understanding specialties and treatments they can access, and identifying if a provider is a good fit. Loyal’s Care Search manages and optimizes the results that patients see. It uses natural language processing (NLP), algorithmic search, and type-ahead suggestions to effectively help patients select the appropriate care provider, all with minimal IT lift and maintenance for the health system.
Some key features
Display of appointment availability by times and dates
Type ahead suggestions assisted by algorithmic search
Ranking of providers based on specialty, clinical focus, and criteria match
Provider cards that give a detailed view of their profile
Multiple location options for providers without leaving search
An overall intuitive experience that make searching easier and more efficient
Designer Valentina Vega
Design Manager Alex Roberts
Digital Front Door: Scheduling
Self scheduling experiences can often feel disjointed, cumbersome, and long for patients. This can be for a variety of issues: hospitals have multiple EHRs, multiple vendors for different parts of the workflow, and inefficient and unclear ways to ask for patient data. With Loyal’s scheduling we have made so a patient can book directly on a health system’s site without signing in to their EHR portal. We also conducted vigorous testing to streamline the personal info that needs to be entered and reduced the average time to book an appointment.
Some key features
Integrated with google enabling direct dropin
A single, consistent patient experience across 4 EHRs
Matches you to the correct appointment type
Efficient and intuitive data collection
Shows alternative providers for chosen patient date and time
Streamlined scheduling from appointment reminders and campaigns
Designer Leslie Williams
Design Manager Alex Roberts
Digital Front Door: AI Assistant
Our team is currently researching what it would mean to pivot from our current chatbot that uses Predictive AI and Natural Language Processing to an Assistant using Generative AI and Natural Language Understanding. Our current chatbot is still valued by our customer, but we would like to address issues that they face such as difficult implementation, keeping content up to date, lack of flexibility with dialog trees, and the inability to get patient feedback. We also want to determine their understanding and expectation of Gen AI and how they see it fitting into the patient experience.
Some learnings thus far
Customers are worried about safety and want guardrails
Customers believe some level of human intervention is necessary
Stakeholders in health system are risk adverse and larger by in is needed
Designer Hannah Koenig
Design Manager Alex Roberts
Patient Engagement Suite: Campaigns
Health systems use multiple disparate tools to engage with their patients. Departments like marketing, clinical, and operations often buy their own engagement tools in silos. Patient then end up receiving messages from multiple systems that don't talk to each other, resulting in a poor experience and lack of visibility for health systems. We have created the ability to build, customize, and send campaigns to the right patient at the right time. This is a communication tool, for marketing, clinical and operations use cases, streamlines patient engagement and drive appointment volume for health systems.
Some key features
Integrated with appointment scheduling
Ability to manage and apply brand look and feel at scale
Pre-built campaign templates
Advance and out of the box audience segmentation template
Ability to tie campaign engagement to appointments and encounters
Designer Bhakti Shah
Design Manager Hannah Stanley
Designer Erin McGlothlin
Patient Engagement Suite: Appointment Reminders
Thirty eight percent of patients miss their appointments because they forgot or didn’t know. Not only is this frustrating for patients, but cancellations and no- shows are also expensive for health systems. With our system providers are able to create, schedule, send, and manage reminders for text and email all in one place.
Some key features
Cached availability & 2-way messaging allows patients to re-book appointments
Bi-directional sync with EHR
Dynamic variables in messages
Custom message content and cadence
Supports diverse care types e.g. ad-hoc, preventative, ambulatory, and acute care
Designer Katie Dawe
Design Manager Hannah Stanley
Reputation Suite: Directory Listings
Many people take for granted that they where their nearest clinic or ER is. Having up to date and accurate information online is crucial for health systems. Unfortunately we learned that most systems were using cumbersome listings management tools that not meant for healthcare. Loyal’s Directory Listings is the only one on the market that was created specifically for healthcare information and uses automation to improve listings data. We have designed this product so that health systems can keep third-party website like Google ,Facebook, Apple, Bing and more up to date.
Some key features
Synchronous, one click updates for listings and providers
Supports HIPAA compliant Google Business Messages and Google Scheduling
Reporting and analytics
Uses generative AI and listing data to create your descriptions
Designer Fengwei Han
Design Manager Alex Roberts
Reputation Suite: Rating and Reviews ( Boost/ Response)
We are now seeing a trend where patients are relying on the web to evaluate the potential providers they see. More than 70% of consumes google when looking for a new provider and 94% use online reviews. We have made it easy for health systems to proactively manage their online reputation and respond to patients quickly and easily.
Some key features
Sentiment analysis
Improve SERP by responding to third party reviews
Publish patient verified comments to provider pages from surveys and CAHPS
Respond to and investigate negative reviews
Designer Fengwei Han
Design Manager Alex Roberts
Loyal’s OS: Data Management
Health systems lack a single source of truth for the provider & location data. Gathering and maintaining the necessary data is a burdensome, often manual task which results in inefficiency and inaccuracy across patient experiences. Loyal’s data management unifies hospital data. It enables operators to manage not only providers and their profiles, but also locations, treatments, procedures, clinical taxonomy, and payor data. By creating a single source of truth patients can receive seamless and consistent results regardless of the digital solutions they are accessing.
Some key features
Approve or reject changes before publishing
Ability to map conditions, treatments, procedures to specialities
Track and view data health and quality
Audit logs: operators can review changes made to their data. Logs can be filtered by time range, entity, and change type.
Clinical taxonomy library
Designer Yeha Youm
Design Manager Hannah Stanley
Measuring our impact
We measure the overall impact of our products through 4 different categories: Growth, Operations, Engagement, and Quality. Each feature that we build needs to fulfill one or more of these categories.
Examples
Growth: Schedule appointment, encounter volume, net new vs incremental growth, and growth by channel
Operations: Capacity, Availability, Fill Rate, No show rate, cancellation rate, and call volume
Engagement: Engagement by channel, Reputation, CAHPS score
Quality: Readmission rate, leakage rate, Hedis measures
