Zealth AI is a Y-Combinator (YC) backed startup that provides end-to-end remote monitoring for patients diagnosed with chronic illnesses like cancer and diabetes. Between July - September 2021, I consulted with Zealth AI and worked closely with Dheeraj Mundhra and Monika Mehta to redesign the UX of CareShare - Zealth's flagship product - using UI components designed by Roni Biswas.

Competitive analysis

We reviewed landing pages, navigation menus and feature sets of popular competitors like Onco.com, Fitterfly, Fitbit, etc., to understand how the competition designed their experiences. Comparing these designs with data from our user interviews helped identify the primary user problems that CareShare wanted to solve.

Understanding our users

Zealth AI offers separate apps for patients and doctors, similar to how Uber has separate apps for riders and drivers (partners). Based on user interviews, we designed personas to represent the different types of users that would be using the CareShare apps. We were able to narrow down our user set to three types of patient personas and a single doctor persona.

We identified five primary user goals that we wanted to solve:

• Reporting and monitoring symptoms
• Online video consultations
• Nutrition management
• Medication adherence
• Digital prescriptions

Reporting and monitoring symptoms

To accurately diagnose and treat chronic illnesses like cancer, doctors need to be aware of the symptoms a patient experiences, when they experience these symptoms and under what conditions. Knowledge of a patient's health history along with regularly measured vital stats helps doctors diagnose symptoms better and plan the next steps of the treatment regimen.

Health history

Traditional paper-based medical forms are time consuming and prone to human error. I designed cards using visual cues and tap-based input to make the process of entering data faster and less mundane. I added defaults and suggestions based on patient history and designed pre-filled templates to reduce the tedium of completing paper-based forms.

Reporting symptoms

Patients often experience one or more symptoms of an illness simultaneously. The diagnosis and subsequent treatment plan for each patient will vary depending on their demographic information, health history and vital stats.

We designed an intuitive step-by-step UI that allows users to select multiple symptoms, highlight where they are feeling pain and rate the severity of their pain on a medically approved pain scale. The CareShare algorithm processes this information along with the patient's historical data and updates the user's health graph, suggesting instructions and medication to relieve the symptoms.

Updating vitals

CareShare gets updated vital stat data through health tracking devices, Bluetooth enabled medical devices or direct manual input. Vitals are used along with symptom and health history to recommend accurate medication and instructions to relieve the reported symptoms.

Online video consultations

Booking a consultation

Patients often want to get a second opinion from a doctor outside of their trusted sources. During our research, we found that a majority of cancer patients had been diagnosed only after a second opinion after their symptoms were persistant despite consulting doctors and using medication.

Video consultation

We used the waiting room screen to educate users with tips on cancer treatment and recovery and to promote new CareShare features.

Since a majority of users are familiar with WhatsApp and FaceTime video chat, we designed the CareShare video chat UI to be similar to both apps in order to reduce the learning curve around using the chat UI.

Post-consultation

Once the consultation is complete, the doctor uploads a prescription (if required). Patients can view the status of their appointment from their appointment history. When the prescription is uploaded, CareShare extracts the recommended medication and displays purchasing options.

Medication tracking and adherence

Medication adherence refers to tracking how long the patient has continued with the prescribed medication. Knowing if a patient has completed their medication within the prescribed duration and recording the outcome allows the medical faculty to make more informed decisions about treatment and recovery.

We designed a medication schedule that allows users to keep track of their progress and get notified when their next dose is due. Users can also view a list of all the medicines that they have been prescribed and purchase the medication when needed. The CareShare algorithm automatically calculates the quantity of medication required based on the prescription and notifies the user when the medication is low.

Adding medication

Patients suffering from chronic illnesses such as cancer or diabetes usually need to take additional medication over and above those prescribed for treating their illness. This is usually required to treat other symptoms that may or may not be related to the illness. As a result, patients and caregivers want to be able to add and keep track of their medication schedule in a single place.

NOTE: Any medication added by a patient needs to be approved by a doctor before they can be added to the medication schedule.

Managing nutrition

Protein is a key requirement for muscle growth and recovery and doctors and nutritionists are interested in knowing if a patient has consumed the recommended amount of calories and protein in a day.

We designed the Nutrition section to provide summary information about goals, meal plans and recipes on the landing page, while allowing users to view data trends and historical data as well.

Recommended nutrition

When a patient undergoes treatment or is in recovery, and depending on the type and stage of the cancer, a nutritionist creates a meal plan specifically for the patient. Similarly, CareShare +PLUS users see a Nutritionist recommends card that appears at the top of the Nutrition landing screen displaying a summary of their nutritional goals.

Custom meal plans

As part of the CARESHARE PLUS+ plan, patients get customized nutritional plans created by Zealth's in-house nutritionists based on the patient's likes, dislikes, medical history and treatment plan.

Digital prescriptions

Digital prescriptions were a highly requested feature particularly after the pandemic. Digital prescriptions alleviate many of the problems associated with traditional paper prescriptions:

• Long and tedious to complete.
• Prone to human error.
• Hard to keep track of.

I designed the Prescriptions landing page to highlight video consultations that had pending prescriptions. Since doctors are usually pressed for time, I wanted the primary focus to be on completing any pending prescriptions. I also added filter and sorting options to help doctors find specific patients quickly.

New prescriptions

I designed a selection menu to help doctors get started with templates for general prescriptions or discharge summaries. Doctors can also choose to use previously saved prescriptions as templates for new prescriptions.

Components and cards

The design framework consists of card-based UI components that represent different states of the system. These cards are combined in different permutations to represent user journeys and experiences for different personas.

Notifications

As a real-time symptom reporting and monitoring system, push notifications are a big part of delivering timely and relevant updates to patients and doctors.

We wanted to allow users to opt-in for notifications instead of having to opt-out. I added UI affordances that allowed the user to choose to be notified when they wanted to be informed about relevant information.

Learnings

Use medically accurate scales and terminology

In the process of trying to simplify the UX, I redesigned the official, medically approved (in India) pain scale to be more emotive and employ a shorter scale (from ten to five). However, when prototyping the new designs, doctors informed us that the new scale was incorrect and had to be similar to the traditional pain scale. Similarly, we had to replace the previously used "health score" with a "health graph" in order to avoid assigning an as yet unapproved numerical score to a patient's health.

Templates, recommendations, suggestions.

Reduce the tedium associated with filling out lengthy paper-based forms for patient history, medical history, family history, etc., that often ask for redundant information. Use visual cues to make data input less mundane, replace data entry with tap-based input. Reuse UI components to reduce data entry.

Use notifications to deliver unique and relevant information.

These days users have multiple apps installed on their phones, each delivering multiple notifications at different times of the day. As a result, users have developed "notification fatigue" and choose to either ignore or turn off notifications entirely.

Notifications are most useful when they deliver the right information at the right time which results in an action that benefits the user. Add affordances in designs to allow users to choose to get notified about the results of an action.

Acknowledgements

I enjoyed working with and learned a lot from Dheeraj Mundhra and Monika Mehta and look forward to working with them again. I also want to acknowledge the great work done by Roni Biswas designing the style guide and the initial visual language around icons, graphic components and screen layouts. This gave me a good starting point from which to advance the design language.