Increasing patient information retention by 196%

Business Partner

Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Role

Product design and management, front and backend development.

Product

CRM managing both existing and potential patients’ information gathering by case managers. Case managers are health educators who communicate with patients to provide health education, customer and patient support, and ensure medical adherence.

Opportunity

When case managers make calls to patients using the CRM, a textbox appears requiring the user to note call’s status:

• Connected
• No Answer
• Voicemail
• Wrong Number
• Disconnected
• Authorized Representative Call
• Other

Once the user selects an option, they can leave a note about the call not only enabling continuous information gathering but giving immediate context about the patient to other people working with the same patients. However, users could only leave notes for calls where users’ calls connected with a patient.

Not only was this inefficient but critical notes were missed and or forgotten slowing down the process of getting medication to the client, for example:

• Not having the patient's accurate phone number.
• Know that they work with a caretaker.
• Patient needs to be reached using another method such as email.

All resulting in slowing down the process of getting the patient their medication. This inefficiency came to light when I fixed a bug causing duplicate notes.

Problem discovery and ideation

A bug was reported where sometimes the user typed a call note into the CRM, a duplicate note would appear in the communication activity log. The duplicate notes cluttering these activity logs would occasionally be copied to the wrong patient.

I debugged the problem and found the root cause, and implemented a fix. The bug was that you could type a note with the "Connected" status and then switch to a different status that didn't have a notes section like "Voicemail" and it would still save that note.

As soon as the bug was fixed case managers were requesting the bug to be put back in because they had been using this as a work around for not being able to take notes for all call types.

I saw a way to not only fix the duplicate bUg issue but also fix the user frustration of not being able to take notes on all call types.

Product Solution

I fixed the duplicate note issue but also added the functionality of entering notes for all call types.

Release and Outcome

Information previously missed was now recorded allowing case managers to save five minutes per day. Resulting in 65 saved minutes per day across 13 case managers.

Not only did this save the case managers time but it also ensured better quality control of patient information.

196% increase in Patient call note retention (YOY)