STRATEGY
Bringing an AI-based symptom assessment to traditional healthcare.
SKILLS
Strategy, prototyping, validation
ROLE
Design lead for Ada Enterprise
Product designer for Handover
COLLAB
Fellow designers, PMs, UX research, medical directors, business development
Background
CONTEXT
Ada Health is an AI-based symptom assessment that tells you which medical condition might be causing your symptoms. With an incredibly successful app launch in 2016, Ada organically became the leading consumer brand for science-based conversational health AI.
GOAL
Ada entered the enterprise healthcare space in 2020 in search of a commercial model. We sensed a huge opportunity to add value for care providers, insurers, and pharmaceutical firms, but we didn’t know what our B2B product would be and how it would work.
Together with product managers I set out to define, craft, and test a product proposition that could bring Ada to value-based health players, and could enable them to provide exceptional care experiences.
Challenges
UNCOVERING THE UNDERLYING COMPLEXITY
Based on Ada's core capabilities, I began mapping out how Ada can connect health consumers to healthcare professionals, care providers and payers.
An early map of the service layers of Ada's Enterprise proposition.
MODULARIZING UX
Based on the first blueprint, we conceived of Assess / Connect / Handover, three product modules that advise and navigate patients to the right level of care, and help healthcare professionals prepare before seeing patients. These sections of the experience work independently or altogether, and are agnostic enough to be used in a large variety of markets and care settings.
Three modules that integrate Ada into other applications and health records.
DESIGNING FOR INTEGRATIONS
Our team built a web-based, reusable version of Ada for our clients to integrate into their customer experience. Often, the trickiest challenge was blending Ada into the client interface across all channels in a seamless yet discoverable way.
Various presentation modes supported by the Ada web SDK.
Design goals
TRANSPARENCY IN DATA SHARING
While assessing symptoms, Ada collects personal and medical data. We found it essential to explicitly show what is being shared with an integration partner.
Explicit consent prior to sharing an assessment report with care providers.
CONFIGURABLE PLATFORM FOR CARE NAVIGATION
Ada is successful when people find their way to the right care they need. For each condition, Ada's advice level is matched with available care options. While healthcare providers fine-tune their care delivery, the experience smoothly guides people to locally available healthcare facilities, in line with the severity of their symptoms.
Ada intelligently connecting people to a range of healthcare services.
AN ASSESSMENT REPORT CARE PROVIDERS TRUST
While Ada app users can review each suggested condition as a visual report, clinicians require an information-dense summary, including likelihoods and contributing symptoms. Through evaluative research, we learned that healthcare professionals rely on the raw patient-reported data.
Presenting Ada's symptom assessment differently to consumers and healthcare professionals.
Impact
ONE PRODUCT, TAILORED VALUE
The healthcare landscape is vast and fragmented. As Ada searched for its place on the market, I stood for bringing an exceptional experience to any care setting, from acute outpatient care to rare disease identification. I worked with our clients and business development team to imagine and prototype experiences adapted to specific scenarios, helping Ada deliver maximum value in each segment. My prototypes showed what it would take to serve and delight those using Ada, regardless of their entry point and health goals.
These prototypes don't represent real client integrations; names of partner brands are ommitted. The symptom assessment is redacted for clarity.
Ada detecting risk of lifestyle disease.
Ada offering self-care advice for managing symptoms at home.
Ada screening patients for rare diseases.
REAL-WORLD EVIDENCE
A pilot study we ran at an ER department tested Ada’s impact on staff efficiency through saving documentation time, and improving patient–clinician communication. Although the anamnesis collected by an AI didn’t make emergency care more efficient, it helped build rapport between patients and doctors in 53%, and with nurses in 100% of the time.
MY TAKEAWAYS
While designing an integratable app is a technical design challenge, design also has a role in defining and delivering against a value proposition. A broader design toolkit helped explore possibilities, de-risk ideas, and test traction in a non-disruptive way before pursuing or committing to partnerships.
Not all concepts made it into the commercial product. My primary goal was to help imagine plausible experiences for consumers and healthcare professionals, as we were looking for product-market fit. Design is great at creatively and tangibly solving problems, and at sizing up the complexity of solutions.
This is a showcase of the work done by the Ada Enterprise team. GEORGIOS MANINIS and ALBERTO OLCESE designed Assess, JOSHUA NEWTON designed Connect, GOBIE NANTHAKUMAR built our design system, and ALBERTO NAVAS edited and animated the brand video.