Challenge: How might we design an inclusive experience for transgender patients across products, and user personas?

My role: Product Designer & Intern Mentor

Team: Product Designer (Me!), Software Engineers, Product Managers, Interns from multiple teams across products

Skills Used: Agile software methodologies, user interviewing, workflow design, brainstorming & sketching, rapid prototyping, interaction design, visual design, cross-product stakeholder management

The Problem

28% of transgender patients have been harassed in medical settings

19% of transgender patients are refused care

50% of transgender patients had to educate their clinicians

50% of transgender patients delay necessary care for fear of discrimination.

Source: National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

Athenahealth had no support for transgender patients and their caregivers across their multiple products. Administrators, nurses, medical assistants, physicians, and billing staff were using painful workarounds to provide care to their transgender patients. This left an already vulnerable patient population to be at risk for incorrect treatment and an emotionally traumatizing experience with our clients.

The Old Experience

Various areas across athenahealth’s products contained gaps for our users in how they would address the patient, provide medical services for the patient, and bill for these services. Some of the gaps for our users included:

• There was no way to record a patient as transgender

• The design of the system made it difficult for users to address the patient by the correct name and pronouns

• Physicians lacked tools to treat and provide medical care tailored to transgender patients, which explained the patients’ unique story

• Billing and external communication wasn’t designed to account for patient privacy and legal accuracy

My Designs

Through physician interviews, resonance testing, user research, and a site visit to the top LGBTQ medical center in the country, Fenway Health, I designed an inclusive solution for the entire transgender experience.

This included updating form fields, the patient banner, the patient schedule, medical templates, the patient portal, the patient scheduling app, and many other areas.

My designs allows users to enter gender identity, sexual orientation, and assigned sex at birth information into our systems. Users can now determine if their patients are transgender, they know how to address their patients, and they have tools to treat their patients’ unique medical needs.

Feedback & Impact

My designs have gone out to all athenahealth clients and we’ve had high usage and positive qualitative feedback. We’ve even had a sale of our application close due to the features that I designed!

• “I really appreciate all the work you have done...it has made my practice much more inclusive” - Craig, Physician

• “I have a prospect that is interested in starting a practice to care for transgender patients…she said she likes what she has seen from our company so much that she isn’t going to talk to any other vendors!” -  athenahealth Sales Exec

• “We love that athena is thinking about this...as a result of your changes, we’ve really updated our intake paperwork and have gotten great feedback from patients.  They’re relieved we’re asking them questions in a positive way” - Erin, Clinical staff at Planned Parenthood

Vision for Improvements

Although this experience delighted our users, there are always areas that I would look to improve the designs. If I had unlimited time and resources I would update the patient banner to reflect the feedback from our users.