Project Type: SPA | UX Design | Full StackRole: Project LeadTechnology: React | Lambda | DynamoDBProject Rocky - this was the code name for the 3+ year program to increase online appointment bookings for Providence Health and Services.
In the summer of 2017 Providence Health and Services launched a program allowing their users to book in office appointments online. This program was initially setup for primary care physicians, a few years later they opened the program up to specialty physicians. In August of 2017 they came to us for help to increase awareness of the functionality and increase the conversion rate of their online appointments. The overall goal of the program was to decrease the number of phone calls their call centers had to handle and to give their users the functionality they had been asking for.
At the start the only way to book an appointment or know that you could is by finding a “Book Online” button on an individual physician profile page. This was some what problematic because users had to almost accidentally discover this functionality, at the start of the program only 200 of their 20,000 physicians were in the program. This made it pretty hard for users to find this functionality.
We started out by running A/B tests on high trafficked pages to raise awareness by showing banners about booking appointments online. This evolved into creating booking widgets for profile pages, location pages and search directories; as well as a single page application where you can view all their physicians in the program (project here).
A major challenge we faced was that the API architecture that was built was made to query one physician’s availability at a time by 30-day intervals. In many instances we wanted to show all physicians at one location and show their first 6 open appointments on load. Since this functionality did not exist, we created our own API and cached all the physician data from multiple sources and stitched it all together to give us all the functionality we would need.
In late 2017 Providence was booking a few online appointments a day. Through the functionality we built them by late 2018 they were booking hundred’s of appointments a day. Our work laid the ground work for internal teams to bake our functionality into their various different sites. We are continuing to iterate and test new functionality as of writing this in February of 2021.
